Bonanza: A story of the Gold Trail

Title: Bonanza: A story of the Gold Trail

Author: William MacLeod Raine

Release date: November 13, 2022 [eBook #69341] Most recently updated: October 19, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Grosset & Dunlap, 1921

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/69341

Credits: Al Haines, Cindy Beyer & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at https://www.pgdpcanada.net. This file was produced from images generously made available by https://archive.org/details/bonanzastoryofgo00raina

BONANZA

A STORY OF THE GOLD TRAIL

BY

WILLIAM MacLEOD RAINE

AUTHOR OF

A MAN FOUR SQUARE,

CROOKED TRAILS AND STRAIGHT,

TROUBLED WATERS, Etc.

GROSSET & DUNLAP

PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT, 1921, 1926, BY WILLIAM MACLEOD RAINE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

The giants with hopes audacious; the giants of iron limb;

The giants who journeyed westward when the trails were new and dim;

The giants who felled the forests, made pathways o’er the snows,

And planted the vine and fig tree where the manzanita grows;

Who swept the mountain gorges, and painted their endless night,

With their cabins rudely fashioned and their camp-fires’ ruddy light;

Who builded great towns and cities, who swung the Golden Gate,

And hewed from the mighty ashlar the form of a sovereign state.

I drink alone in silence to the builders of the West—

“Long life to the hearts still beating, and peace to the hearts at rest.”

BONANZA

BONANZA

CHAPTER I

THE PONY EXPRESS RIDER

Far as the eye could see lay a rough and broken desert of sage. It stretched to the edge of a flat and arid world.

In front of the long one-story adobe station a man waited, eyes turned to the west. His hand rested on the flat straight back of a spirited chestnut horse. Byers was small and wiry, hard as nails. His high-heeled boots, buckskin breeches, flannel shirt, and skull cap had all been chosen for utility and not for looks. He wasted no energy in useless protest, but the fat station keeper who leaned against the door jamb and chewed tobacco knew he was seething with impatience. The wrangler holding a second saddled horse knew it, too. For the pony express rider from Carson was late and his delay was keeping Byers from starting on the next lap of the transcontinental journey.

The fat man sang lugubriously and tunelessly in a voice that had been created solely for his own amusement.

“Old Grimes is dead, that good old man,

We ne’er shall see him more.

He wore a single-breasted coat,

All buttoned down before.”

The wrangler looked at him reproachfully and murmured, “Durned if he wouldn’t sing at a wake and spoil everybody’s enjoyment.”

“His heart was open as the day,

His feelin’s all were true.

His hair it was inclined to gray,

He wore it in a queue,”

intoned the vocalist.

“Not news,” the wrangler told himself bitterly. “I done heard all them interestin’ details two hundred and seventy-three times.” Aloud, he attempted a diversion. “Len’ me a loan of a chew of tobacco, Jim.”

The station keeper dived into his left hip pocket, produced a ragged plug, and offered it to his helper. Meanwhile he gave further information about the wearing apparel and physical idiosyncrasies of one Grimes, defunct.

“Wonder what’s holdin’ Tim,” the stableman interposed at the end of another stanza.

“He ain’t been late before in a blue moon. I don’t recollect as he ever was late,” answered the fat man, drawn momentarily from his rhymed epitaph.

Byers said nothing.

The habit of the hard-riding pony express messengers of Russell, Majors, and Waddell was to be ahead of schedule. Each man prided himself on covering his relay under the assigned number of hours. The mounts supplied were chosen for speed, stamina, and heart; the men for gameness, resource, and knowledge of the country. To be late was contrary to the tradition of the service.

The pony express was a triumph of American pluck and energy. It stretched from St. Joseph to San Francisco, two thousand miles through the heart of the Indian country. The enterprise included five hundred superb horses, nearly two hundred stations, a hundred riders. The men in the little racing saddles were stripped to the last ounce. For protection they carried only a knife and a revolver. The mail bags never weighed more than twenty pounds. Each letter was written on thin tissue paper. The postage on the smallest was five dollars. Between the Missouri and Sacramento the time-table called for ten days, but often the pouches moved two hundred miles toward their destination in twenty-four hours.

Those in the saddle had to be man size in soul. No weaklings ever applied for this job. Some of those in the service were outlaws, for court warrants did not reach into the sage. Many were desperadoes.[1] But few of them were quitters. They played out the hand that had been dealt them.

[1] This was more true of the station keepers and the attendants than of the stage drivers and pony express messengers. Slade, the notorious man killer, was superintendent of a division at Julesburg, Colorado. He succeeded Jules, whom he murdered in cold blood. Slade ruled his crew of wild assistants with an iron fist. He was an able and efficient servant of the company. Later he was hanged by the vigilantes in Montana. Legends of the country, probably much exaggerated, credit him with having killed thirty men.—W. M. R.

“Tim’s sure late,” the wrangler said hurriedly, for he saw signs of a return to music which did not soothe his savage breast.

“Kid McClintock’s early. Hour ahead of his schedule,” the station keeper replied.

Far away to the east a small cloud of dust rose from the sage and greasewood. Almost at the same time a second billow of yellow alkali appeared in the sunset glow of the opposite horizon.

The fat man grumbled. “Hell’s hinges! That accident to Meighan is liable to shoot the whole schedule up. Tim’ll have to double back to Carson in his place. I’ll have him dig us up another man there.”

The rider from the east arrived at the station first. He pulled up beside the wrangler, leaped to the ground, and at the same time reached for the tie straps which fastened the flat leather mail pouches to the saddle. Two minutes was allowed for the change of sacks from one horse to another, but usually the transfer was made in ten seconds. The messenger, a long lean boy, swept the pouches deftly from one saddle to the other.

“Where’s Meighan?” he asked.

“Done bust his laig tryin’ to gentle that sorrel mustang. Tim Keefe will have to take his run to-night.”

“Where’s Tim?”

“Not in yet. There’s his dust.” The station keeper waved a fat hand toward the sunset.

Byers had been watching intently the dust cloud moving through the brush. “Something’s wrong,” he said briefly.

Hugh McClintock looked. The approaching horse was off the trail. Its gait was peculiar. Plunging unsteadily in spurts, it was weaving from side to side. Instead of a rider, a sack seemed to be prone in the saddle.

McClintock ran forward and caught the bridle of the unsteady horse. The flank of the animal was clotted with a splash of dust and blood.

The sack slid from the saddle as the horse shied. The sack was a man who had been clinging feebly to the mane of the bay. He groaned.

“Piutes—this side the Silver Mountains,” he whispered, and fainted.

The station manager, the wrangler, and McClintock gave him first aid. An arrow head, deeply imbedded, projected from the flesh back of the shoulder. One of the rider’s boots was filled with blood, due to a bullet which had shattered the ankle.

Byers spent no time in helping with the wounded man. He had other business. If the Indians got a messenger, that was in the day’s work. The mails had to go through without delay. He transferred the pouches to his own saddle, swung on, and galloped into the desert.

Kid McClintock rose. He, too, must be on his way, for there was nobody else to carry the mail to Carson City.

“I’ll be movin’,” he said briefly.

“Looks like you’re elected,” agreed the fat man, following the boy to a water olla where the young fellow washed his baked throat, drank deeply, and filled his canteen. “Not much use wishin’ advice on you. It’s a gamble, o’ course. Injuns may be anywhere. But I reckon maybe you better swing to the south and hit the Walker River range. They’re liable to be watchin’ the trail for you.”

“I reckon.”

The boy moved to the fresh horse, spurs dragging and jingling. He had done his day’s work. The horse upon which he had ridden in, lathered with sweat and still breathing deep from a long fast run, was mute testimony of this. The dry powdery dust of the desert covered every inch of the young rider. His legs were stiff and his shoulders tired. But the spring of splendid youth trod in his stride.

He had before him more than another hundred miles of travel, through a country infested by hostile savages. He might get through alive or he might not. That was on the knees of the gods. He had to take what came. More than once he had run a gauntlet of redskins. He had been a target for their arrows and their slugs. Tim was not the first messenger he had seen bring in on his person souvenirs of their missiles. The one salient point was that the mail had to go through. It always had reached its destination—always but once. On that occasion the messenger offered the only acceptable excuse for his failure. He lay dead on the trail, his scalp gone.

McClintock shot westward in a cloud of dust. Half a mile from the station he swung sharply to the south.

CHAPTER II

“HURRAH FOR WASHOE!”

Placerville was busy as a hive of bees on a warm June afternoon. Its hotels and restaurants were crowded to capacity. The saloons were doing a rush business and the gambling halls teemed with a packed and jostling humanity. Grocery stores bustled with the activity of clerks filling orders, packing supplies, nailing up boxes, and sewing bales. The main streets were filled with mixed crowds of miners, speculators, gamblers, men of leisure then known as “bummers,” and such flotsam as is always washed up in the stampede for a new mining camp.

Vaqueros drove loaded mules and burros through the streets with soft liquid oaths of command. A sixteen-horse ore wagon, painted red, the bed of it six feet deep, rumbled down the road with two “back-actions” behind, each of these also filled with ore. They had come straight from the diggings at Virginia City. Freight outfits were loading at stores and wholesale liquor houses with supplies for the new camp. Men bought and sold hurriedly. A hundred outfits were being roped up to cross the Sierras to the Carson Valley. Ox teams swung into town and out again with goods for the new district. Everywhere was that orderly confusion of many cross currents of humanity moving to a common end.

That common end was Washoe.[2] The name was on every tongue. It dominated every mind. All the able-bodied old prospectors who had come round the Horn in the old days, who had followed the stampedes to Kern River, the Fraser, and Told Bluff, were now headed as by one impulse for the silver diggings at the foot of Mt. Davidson. Such rich grounds never had been seen before. All one had to do was to pan the outcroppings and grow rich in a few weeks. Hurrah for Washoe! Hip hip for the land of golden dreams! Washoe or bust!

[2] Nevada was commonly known as Washoe until its admission as a territory under the Spanish name.—W. M. R.

A canvas-covered emigrant wagon drawn by a pair of emaciated horses moved slowly toward the hills. The driver was a bullet-headed young fellow with sullen, close-set eyes. These were a peculiar grayish-yellow, and the pupils were very small. He was unshaven, poorly dressed, and far from clean. The hardship of a long overland trip had undermined his self-respect and worn away the thin veneer of the man’s civility.

At the crest of the first rise he turned in his seat and looked back toward the town. “Good-bye, Hangtown,”[3] he shouted with an oath, shaking his ragged whip.

[3] In the early days Placerville was often called Hangtown.

The skeleton horses crept up the road toward the mountains. Presently evidence of the stampede to Washoe began to manifest itself. The prairie schooner passed a broken-down stage, a smashed wheel, a splintered wagon tongue snapped in the middle. An empty whisky barrel advertised one of the chief staples of trade. A dead burro lay half buried in the mire.

The road had been a good one once. Perhaps it would be hard and firm again after the slush from the rains had dried. Just now it was one to try the patience of man and beast. There were stretches where even the pack mules bogged down while Mexican drivers beat and hauled at them to an accompaniment of excited curses in their native tongue.

A stage from Virginia City swung down the grade, “Pony” King on the box holding the lines, his long whip crackling out snakelike toward the leaders. The stage was not a handsome Concord, the pride of every employee of the company, but one of the mud-wagons used as a substitute when the roads were bad. A pack train of fifteen animals overtook the covered wagon. These carried nothing but liquors—whisky, gin, lager beer, brandy, some pipes of California wine, and a few baskets of champagne. Foot travellers, carrying outfits on their backs, ploughed wearily forward. Nothing but the wonders of the Comstock Lode could have kept their tired legs moving through the mud.

At every gulch there was a bar, the fixtures improvised from a couple of dry-goods boxes and a canvas top. Restaurants announced themselves every few miles, as well as hotels, which had all necessary accommodations for tired stampeders except food, beds, and bedding.

Later in the day the prairie schooner came into a region where patches of snow began to appear in the hill crotches above. The grade was stiffer and the poor horses made sorry progress. A dozen times they gave up, exhausted. The driver beat them furiously with his whip and flung raucous curses at them. From the wagon a big-eyed child and a wan-faced woman dismounted to lighten the load. Once the woman timidly murmured a protest at her husband’s brutality. Savagely he turned on her, snarling his rage explosively.

She shrank back, afraid that he was going to use the whip on her. “Don’t, Rob,” she begged, face white as the snow in the bank beside the road.

A burro train swung round the bend, and the man flung away from her and lashed the horses instead.

They camped that night at the mouth of a cañon and were on the road at daybreak next morning. The travellers were well into the mountains now. The spring rains had been heavy and had loosened the snow on the slopes. Landslides were frequent and the air was filled with the thunder of avalanches. The trail itself was treacherous. It was honeycombed with chuck holes where the mules of pack outfits had broken through and wallowed in the mud.

The American River plunged down a cañon beside the road. A growth of heavy pines bordered the trail.

When the gaunt team dragged into the clearing at Strawberry Flat hundreds of men and scores of teams were camped there for the night. The animals were tied to the tongues and sides of the wagons and fed from long feed-boxes. They were protected from the cold by heavy canvases lined with blanket stuff. The men who handled the jerkline and the blacksnake curled up under the wagons. Soon they were fast asleep, oblivious to the soft snow that drifted in and wrapped them about.

The driver of the prairie schooner fed and watered the horses while his wife made supper. She found dry wood for kindling in the wagon, and the little girl, who was all thin arms and legs and wild flying hair, gleefully cleared away snow from the spot selected. Soon a fire was roaring and little Victoria was sniffing the savoury odour of a jackrabbit stew.

She hopped up and down, first on one foot, then on the other.

“Goody, goody. Le’s hurry up’n eat, Sister Mollie,” she shouted, waving a spoon excitedly.

After supper Robert Dodson disappeared into the nearest grog shop, and his wife retired to the wagon and nursed a six-weeks-old baby. Victoria washed the dishes, played around the fire, and after a time came hop-skipping through the snowflakes to their canvas-covered home.

“Sister Mollie,” announced the child, climbing nimbly up from the tongue, “when I’m big I’m gonna marry a prince, ’n he won’t ever get drunk ’n beat me like Rob does you.”

“Sh-h-h! You mustn’t say such things, Vicky,” the older sister admonished.

“ ’N I’m gonna have shoes without holes in ’em ’n a dress not all patchy, with gold spangles ’most all over it. ’N he’ll have a silver chariot ’n great big white horses with long tails—not jus’ plugs like ours.”

Mollie sighed and caught the baby in her arms tighter, so that for a moment the infant stirred restlessly in its sleep. She, too, had once known dreams of the fairy prince who was to come riding gallantly into her life and to carry her irresistibly into the Land of Romance.

From the tent barroom where her husband had gone came the words of a drunken chorus:

“Exciting times all round the town,

Glory, Glory to Washoe,

Stocks are up and stocks are down,

Glory, Glory to Washoe.

Washoe! Washoe!

Bound for the land of Washoe,

And I own three feet

In the ‘Old Dead Beat,’

And I’m bound for the land of Washoe.”

Mollie recognized the voice of her husband and then his tipsy laugh. Her slight body shivered underneath the thin shawl she was wearing.

CHAPTER III

THE NIGHT RIDE

Hugh McClintock drew his horse to a walk and skirted the base of a hill. He patted the shiny neck of the bay affectionately. The boy loved the mounts he rode. His life depended on their stamina and speed, and they had never failed him.

“Good old Nevada Jim,” he whispered. “We got a long trail before us through these red devils, but I reckon we’re good for it, me ’n you.”

He was swinging well to the south of the Silver Mountains, riding through country covered with brush. He had been travelling at a rapid pace as he wound in and out among the sage and greasewood. Now he had reached the hills that marked the limit of the range. His intention was to go by way of Alkali Flat, circle Walker Lake, and cross the Walker River range. This plan was subject to change, for at any minute he might run into the Piutes. On the other hand, which was more likely, he might reach Carson without having had a glimpse of them.

Boy though he was, he knew Indians. His father was one of the earliest pioneers in Eagle Valley. Hugh’s first recollection was of the trip from Salt Lake through the desert. He recalled that a cow had worked side by side in the wagon with an ox. The first plough that had broken a furrow in Nevada had been made by his father from discarded wagon tires picked up on the overland road to California. He remembered the days when Captain Jim in beads and buckskin and his breech-clothed tribe had hung around the settlers in pretended friendship. Tame coyotes instead of dogs had followed them. There hung in his mind the memory of a morning when he had gone to the stable to find the horses run off and the cows stuck full of arrows.

One adventure he would never forget. His mother had wakened him at midnight and dressed him hurriedly. He and his younger brother had been packed in apple boxes slung on the opposite sides of a mule. Rifle in hand, his father had walked beside a second mule upon which Hugh’s mother rode. So they had crossed the Sierras from Mormon Station into California, driven from home by the news that the Indians were raiding the valleys. In his young life he could recall a hundred such memories of the dangers and hardships of pioneering.