AFTER THE GOLD RUSH: Echoes from Coloma

1859

Ophir Township, California

Monday, July 4th

“Where’s William?” Ellen wondered and worried.

She pushed aside the cloth door of their plank shanty. The baby’s screams had woken her older sister. Baby Kate wouldn’t suckle and now Mary Ellen refused to be comforted by the usual tickle. William would be of little assistance, but Ellen wanted him home anyway. She had grown tired of his evening absences.

A few threadbare fireworks arced in the sky across the river. There were more than the usual amount of gunshots, hopefully more celebratory than threatening. From this distance, Ellen couldn’t be sure.

The day had started with such promise. Ellen left the cabin for the first time since Kate’s arrival weeks before. And it had been William’s idea. “Let’s take the girls. They won’t much like the speechifying, but they might enjoy the music.” In fact, the opposite turned out to be true.

Mary Ellen, their toddler, had sat atop William’s dusty boots, watching intently as a man proudly unfurled his homespun flag of calico and muslin from the sheared pine branch above the gazebo. Then, a burly man, wearing what Ellen supposed was the uniform of the revolution, marched up the steps and commenced to read from the Declaration. When in the due Course of human events … Ellen moved her weight from hip to hip to keep the Baby Kate from stirring.

We hold these truths to be self-evident… Looking down at her daughter, a cherub, Ellen reckoned she’d only experienced two of the three self-evident truths. And yet, she had to concede, this hardscrabble life was better than what she had known. Ellen wasn’t cold in the bones as she had been in Ireland, at least not in summer. She and the babies ate regular even though she knew that the grocer often provided the salt pork and beans with the expectation that William “was good for it.” And one day when William’s prospects improved, the four of them would live in a hewn log cabin, with a plank floor, and a stone hearth. No more mud and dust.

We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor. Ellen had pledged her life to William and he to her. The American colonists had struggled and suffered in the Revolution, but they finally threw off the yoke of the oppressor, the one still terrorizing Éirann, the one who had driven them to this new land.

When Ellen allowed herself to dream, really dream, she saw a farmhouse surrounded by orchards. Mary Ellen and Kate, big and strong, would help their parents tend apple trees and strawberry vines – crann úll and súu talún. It would be like Ireland, only better.

It was the volley of trumpets from the gazebo that startled the girls. Baby Kate, swaddled in cotton, cried out, causing a few men to turn around. A woman in town was rare; children rarer still; something akin to seeing a bear cub wandering down Oak Street.

“Why don’t you take the girls home now. I’ll be along presently,” William whispered.

Ellen didn’t want to leave – the freedom had been bracing – but she knew she couldn’t stay, not with the wailing child, which likely would soon give rise to another malcontent. “I’ll have supper waiting. Something special to mark the day.” She also knew that “presently” was a word of little meaning for William.

After being ferried across the river on a small raft – Ellen and the girls, the only passengers – they were back in their hot, dusty hovel. Once again, she felt like she was living in a barn and she was the cow.

Mary Ellen had come quickly; ten months after their April wedding. William was working a small claim then with a long tom alongside a few other men. They pooled their resources. Some weeks were better than others, but most weeks there was just enough to cover the grocer’s tab or maybe a bit more. Then, the curious man from Illinois – Ellen had danced with him once – hit it big and slipped off into the night towards Marysville without sharing his reward with the others. William and the other partners had chased after him, but he gave them the slip.

With the rounding of Ellen’s belly and the expectation of a second child, William had joined a small company of men using pressurized water fired from a canvas hose to blast the hillside north of the river, where they hoped to loosen gold from quartz. The money was regular, but it was – all things considered – less than before. William took on other jobs – felling trees, planning lumber. He was also spending some time in the saloons hoisting a porter or a whiskey. Ellen had to concede that William’s prospects had gotten worse. And now there was another mouth to feed. This, in turn, seemed to fuel his “dark humors.”

Ellen continually reminded William of other’s successes to bolster him. The company just steps away upriver had scratched out a gold deposit the size of a summer squash. And in Dogtown, not 25 miles away, miners had unearthed a vein the size of a tree limb – 54 pounds. William didn’t hear this as words of encouragement but rather as a recitation of his deficiencies. He would occasionally give his wife the back of his hand, but each time, he regretted it. “Ah Ellen, my sweet angel, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s forgotten,” she would say. But really Ellen remembered that her father sometimes slapped her mother. These things can happen in a marriage, especially when things aren’t going well. Ellen fretted that the log cabin and the hearth, the farmhouse and the orchards, were likely little more than a bréag, a fairy tale.

After preparing a cornmeal mash for Mary Ellen, Ellen got William’s dinner ready. Alongside the usual dried beef, the first tomato of the season – red, like the color of the flag. She sat down at their small table and waited. And waited. The truth was, she was just so lonely. She hadn’t really been a carouser, a woman of the night. That was all an act, a means to an end. But this was not the end she had foreseen. Ellen waited some more.

The sun down, the wind picking up, Ellen and the baby stood in the doorway, Mary Ellen stirring behind them on the thin mattress. In the darkness, she could see William list this way and that as he approached, a lantern, fashioned from a claret bottle, in his hand.

“Where’ve you been, love?” she asked.

“With the men,” he mumbled as he walked past her, collapsing on the bed. He hadn’t even noticed that she was holding the baby, that his supper was on the table.

Fully clothed, his boots still on, William tucked in next to a now-crying Mary Ellen on the bed. He ran a crusty finger along the back of his daughter’s delicate, ivory neck. With a craggy throat, he sang,’Twas not her beauty alone that won me; Oh no, 'twas the truth in her eyes ever dawning; That made me love Mary the Rose of Tralee.

Mary Ellen’s eyes fluttered closed. William’s soon after. This was the man Ellen spent her life with, the man with whom she wished to pursue happiness, the man she saw less and less of, the man who brought home fewer and fewer coins with each passing year. Even if you wish it so, there is not a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow. Ellen placed the baby on the newspaper-lined bottom drawer of the bureau.

William had once sung for her. No more.