Kitabı oku: «Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444», sayfa 2

A. B. R.

BILL WILLIAMS:

A STORY OF CALIFORNIA

It was in the first flush of the Californian fever, when moderate people talked of making one's fortune in a fortnight, and the more sanguine believed that golden pokers would soon become rather common, that the Betsy Jones from London to New Zealand, with myself on board as a passenger, dropped anchor in the bay of San Francisco, and master and man turned out for the diggings. It is my impression that not a soul remained on board but the surgeon, who was sick, and the negro cook, who wouldn't leave him; and the first man I met on the deck of the Go-Ahead steamer, which took as up to Sacramento, was our enterprising captain, clad in a canvas jacket and trousers, with the gold-washing apparatus, two shirts, and a tin kettle, slung at his back. The crew followed his example, and all the passengers. The latter were some thirty men, from every corner of Britain, and of various birth and breeding. There were industrious farm-servants and spendthrift sons of gentlemen among them. Some had sailed with money, to purchase land in the southern colony, some were provided only with their hopes and sinews; but California was an irresistible temptation to them all, and by general desire, they had come to try their luck at the washing. We had mere boys and men of grizzling hair in our company. Two were married, but they wisely left their wives in San Francisco, where, having brought with them some spare blankets and crockery, the ladies improvised a boarding-house, and I believe realised more than their wandering lords. Nevertheless, we, one and all, went up the broad river with loftier expectations than the prudent among us cared to make public.

There was one who made no secret of his hopes. The man's name was Bill Williams. I had had a loose acquaintance with Bill from school-time, for we had been brought up in the same good town of Manchester, where his father was a respectable tradesman, and his three brothers were still in business. Many a town and many a trade had Bill tried to little purpose. Never doing what his relatives could call well, he had gone through a series of failures, which tired out both kinsmen and creditors, and at length shipped for New Zealand, leaving a wife and seven children to the care of the said three brothers, till he should see how the climate agreed with him, and find a home for them. Bill did not belong to the extended fraternity of scapegraces. He was neither wild nor worthless, in the ordinary sense of those terms, but there was a faith in him, the origin of which baffled his most penetrating friends, that he was to get money somehow without working for it by any of the common methods. Unlike many a professor of better principles, Bill had carried that faith into practice. Under its influence, he had engaged in every scheme for making fortunes with incredible rapidity which coffee-house acquaintances or advertising sheets brought to his knowledge. There was not a banking bubble by which he had not lost, nor a mining company of vast promise and brief existence in which he had not held shares. Uncompromisingly averse to the jog-trot work of ordinary mortals. Bill was neither indolent nor timid in his own peculiar fashion of seeking riches. He would have gone up in a balloon to any height, or down in a diving-bell to depths yet unsounded, had the promise been large enough; and there was something so suitable to his inclinations in the Californian reports, that he was the prime mover of our visit to San Francisco, and the entire desertion of the ship. Strange to say, every man on board believed in Bill; from the captain to the cabin-boy, they had all listened to his tales. Where he had learned such a number, fortune knows, concerning found treasures, and wealth suddenly obtained by unexpected and rather impracticable ways. That was the whole circle of Bill's literature, and going over it appeared his chief joy; but the gem of the collection was a prophecy which a gipsy woman, whom his mother met once in a country excursion, had uttered concerning himself—that he should find riches he never wrought for, and leave a great fortune behind him. In the faith of that prediction Bill had lived; and it was a curious illustration of the sympathetic force inherent in a firm belief, that both passengers and seamen, even those who affected to laugh at the rest of what they called his wonderful yarns, entertained a secret conviction in favour of that tale, and felt secure of gold-gathering in Bill's company.

I am not certain that my own mind was entirely clear of a similar impression, but the two among us who contemned loudest and believed most devoutly, were the captain and his mate. They were brothers, and of Jewish parentage; the rest of the family still hang about an old-clothes and dyeing establishment in the neighbourhood of Houndsditch. I made that discovery by an accidental glance at a torn and mislaid letter before we left the Thames, and thought proper to reserve it for private meditation. The relationship of the two was kept a profound secret, for reasons best known to themselves; but to the eye at least it was revealed by their striking resemblance, both being small, spare, dingy-complexioned men, with keen, cunning eyes, and faces that looked as hard and sharp as steel. Ever since they first heard of the prophecy, they had half ridiculed, half flattered, and kept remarkably familiar with Bill. That familiarity rather increased as we went up the Sacramento. A goodly number we made on the deck of the Go-Ahead, our only place of accommodation; and at length we reached the new town, the golden city, which takes its name from the river, christened in old times of Spanish voyaging by some discoverer for his Catholic majesty, and which was to be the metropolis of the diggings. When I first saw it, it consisted of some hundred huts and tents, a large frame-house, in which an advertising board informed us there was an ordinary, a gaming-table, and all manner of spirits; and a timber wharf, somewhat temporarily put together, at which we landed. Yet the city was rising, as cities rise only in the western hemisphere: broad streets and squares were marked out; building was going forward on all sides; while bullock-wagons, canoes, and steamers, brought materials by land and water. The enterprise and vagrancy of all nations were there, as we had seen them at San Francisco; and those not engaged in building the town, were going off in caravans to the gold-gathering.

We fraternised with a company of Americans, who said they knew 'a bluff that flogged creation for the real metal,' and sold us two spare tents and a wagon, at a price marvellous to ask or pay. Our journey was not far. It led along the course of the Sacramento, and towards evening we came in sight of the diggings. A strange sight it was for one accustomed to London streets and shops. The Sacramento runs through a great inclined plane, sloping from the hill-country to the sea. Here and there, it is covered with low coppice or underwood; but the greater part is bare and sandy, or sprinkled over with thin, dry waving grass. As far as the eye could reach upon the plain, and up the river-banks, the smoke of fires was rising from hut, tent, and upturned wagon, which served for temporary dwellings. Groups of men were hard at work in small trenches, and numbers more stood with pan and cradle, washing out the gold in the shallow creeks of the river. 'Our location,' as the Americans called it, was an earthy promontory jutting far out into the water. Close by its landward base we pitched our tents, turned up our wagon—the bullocks that brought it belonged to the Americans, who promised to sell us a share when they were killed—and commenced operations. Digging out tenacious clay, and washing its sandy particles for minute grains of gold, sleeping under canvas at night, and living on half-cooked and not very choice provisions, have little in them of interest worth relating. The first thing that struck me, was the silence that prevailed among the workers. In a district so populous, scarcely a sound was heard from tent, trench, or river. Caravan after caravan, as it arrived, pitched its tents, and fell to work in the same quiet fashion. A cynical character might have attributed this to the absence of all feminine faces, for in my time there was not a woman at the diggings. Incredible as it may seem to the fair ones themselves, they were not missed; but nobody missed anything except gold. Relations parted; old comrades left each other with scarcely a leave—taking in search of better gatherings; our American friends began to get tired of the bluff that flogged creation; for although we were getting gold, it was but little, and the more impatient spirits of our company departed with them to find another.

I wondered that Bill did not join their company. He was long ago weary of gold-washing; the work was too regular, and the returns far too slow for him. He used to declare that shopkeeping was better; and it is probable that most of us had similar convictions regarding the vocations we had left in Britain; but except occasionally cooking for the rest, smoking the tobacco he had providently brought with him, and suggesting wild projects of digging down the bluff, and dredging the river for lamps of gold, which, he said, all the grains we found came off, Bill at last did nothing at all. With hard labour and harder fare, we had collected some of us more and some less of the precious dust; but nobody's fortune was yet made, and the rainy season set in.

The heavy rains confined us for days to the shelter of tent and wagon; but the days were nothing to the nights, which on the banks of the Sacramento are almost equinoctial throughout the year; and we had neither coal nor candle. All the fuel that could be found was rather too little for culinary purposes. Concerning the rest of our comforts, there is no use in being particular; but at intervals between the drowning showers, we were willing enough to come out and work, though the muddy soil and the swollen river made our labour still harder, and our profits less. The best service was done us by an honest Paisley weaver, who had left his helpmate and two children at San Francisco, in hopes of taking back, quite full, a strong chest, of some two hundredweight capacity, which he had brought with infinite pains to the diggings. He enlivened our wet leisure by repeating whole volumes of Burns and Scott. Bill also returned to his wonderful stories, though the captain and mate sneered at them more than ever; indeed, they were by far the most discontented of the company, and an unaccountable sort of distrust seemed growing between them and Bill. At length, fever and ague began to thin the ranks of the gold-seekers; we saw the working-parties around us diminish day by day, and graves dug in the shadows of the low coppice. Our company kept lip amazingly, perhaps because, according to the captain's counsel, we held but little communication with other workers; but the want of the buffalo-meat, which the Indian traders were accustomed to bring, was much felt among us; and one day less rainy than usual, Bill Williams, as the idlest, was sent up the river's bank, on their wonted track, to look out for their coming. The rest were busy, and did not miss him; but I thought he stayed long. The sky became unusually dark; great clouds floated over us from the west, and then broke with a sudden thunder-crash, which was renewed every five minutes with such rain and lightning as I had never seen. We ran to our tents, and, when fairly sheltered, Bill also arrived, wet to the skin, out of breath, and looking terribly frightened. He said, hastily, that he had seen nothing, and no word of the Indians; but the poor fellow began to shiver as he spoke, and before evening the fever was strong upon him.

To keep the rest safe, he was quartered alone in a small hut which the Americans had left us. It was a poor shelter, being built of turf, and roofed with boughs and grass, but as good as any we had. There was no surgeon among us, and handing him food or drink was deemed a perilous business; but all his comrades had a sort of a liking for Bill, and, besides, he was regarded as the palladium of the party. The fever was not violent, though Bill raved at times, and all his wanderings were after gold. I have heard him talk for half-hours together in a loud whisper, as if communicating a secret to some very dull car, concerning a pool among rocks, with glistening sands, and something shining far down in a crevice. He was restless, too, and kept looking out on the track of the Indians after they had come and gone. One evening I observed him particularly so. The night fell with heavy rain; we all took early to shelter, and slept so soundly, that Bill was forgotten among us; but in the morning we found him lying wrapped in his blanket, as thoroughly wet as if he had been dipped in the river, while the hut remained quite dry. Where he had been, or under what illusion of the fever, we could not learn, for he never spoke a rational word after. The wet and exposure increased his malady tenfold. He became fiercely delirious, and struck at whoever approached him, swearing he would let nobody kill him for his gold. The captain warned us all, that this was the most dangerous time for infection; but I saw that he and his brother had got wind of something, for their eyes were never off the hut.

Towards the second evening, Bill grew worse, his ravings became faint and low, and he lay gathered up on a corner of his mattress. I had placed a pitcher of water as near him as possible, escaping by chance a blow which the poor soul struck at me in his feverish fury; but I could not help thinking of him when we had all gone to rest. The night was so still, that I could hear the rush of the river and the cries of the night-hawks on its opposite bank; but being unable to sleep, I crept out of the tent, and looked to Bill's hut. A smothered sound of scuffling came from that direction, and stepping nearer, I saw by the rising moon, which just then shone with extraordinary brightness, two men struggling, as it seemed for life, in the narrow space between Bill's bed and the door.

'If you don't give me the full half, I'll tell them all,' said the voice of the captain's brother; but almost as he spoke, his antagonist threw him heavily back. I knew it was upon poor Williams, for a low moan reached my ear, and I sprang forward just in time to intercept the victor, who stumbled over me as he rushed out, and a heavy bag rolled from him. The next moment the other was at my side, and I stood face to face with the captain and his brother in the broad moonlight. The bag for which they had sneaked, and sinned, and scuffled, had burst by the fall, and its contents—stones, gravel, and sand, with some small sparkles of gold-dust amongst them—were scattered at my feet. Both stood stupefied, and I stepped into the hut; but Bill was dead, and growing cold, with his stiff hands stretched out, as if clutching at something, and a wild expression of pain and anger in the ghastly face, which lay turned up to the moon. Her light filled the hut, and lay upon plain, and tent, and river. It was a glorious night, such as sometimes shines in the gold-country. I woke up my comrades, and told them what I had seen, but they all said: 'Poor Bill! How could they help it? and it was a good thing that the captain and his chum had been disappointed;' upon which every man composed himself again to sleep.

Next morning, the captain and mate were gone with all their traps, having joined, as we afterwards heard, a company returning to San Francisco. We laid Bill beside the gold-seekers who rested in the coppice, and our company broke up, and scattered away: some settled at San Francisco; some went to the United States; and I, having collected through so many hardships almost a pound of dust, returned to the employment I had left in London with such high contempt. From an old comrade, however, still located at the diggings, I heard by letter that a party of Americans had made a great discovery of gold among some rocks in a creek of the Sacramento, and that they had found, sticking fast in a crevice close by, a small spade marked with the name of Bill Williams, which the poor fellow had cut on the handle, as I well remembered, in one of his many idle hours. This explained to me Bill's long absence when he went to look for the Indians, his after-anxiety, and where he had been in the delirium of the fever, filling up that canvas bag which so fatally deceived the captain and his brother. The last I heard of these worthies was, that they had gone to the diggings in Australia; and I never see gold in any shape without a recollection of their disappointment, and my own experiences in California.