Chapter 18
New Times Come to Miracle Springs

By the time I got back to the claim, the afternoon was half gone and it was snowing again. Not real snow—it was toward the end of May, and though snow that late wouldn’t have been out of the question higher up in the mountains, down in the foothills where we lived it would have been close to impossible.

A storyteller might call it snowing “figuratively.” Sometimes a writer says something that has more than one meaning, like the apple tree when I was telling about Katie. So when I say it was snowing, I mean that God had already begun to answer my prayers again, my prayers about wanting to be true and to write in a true way. Like the last time, when it was really snowing, I didn’t recognize the things that happened as God’s little answering snowflakes coming down into my life.

The invisible snowflakes of answered prayer are falling down all around, millions of them. But it takes a special kind of sight to see them, and most folks never know that kind of snow’s falling. You have to learn to hunt for them, learn to see them, train your eyes—your inner eyes, the eyes that look out of your heart and your mind. Just about everything having to do with God and the spiritual side of life is like that—they’re things you have to train yourself to see.

And so I’ve been trying to train myself to look for buried, hidden, invisible things the more I grow as a Christian—the hidden meanings that are all around us, the invisible little glimpses of God that most folks don’t notice.

When I got back to the house, there sat Rev. Rutledge’s buggy out in front. I didn’t think anything much about it until I went inside. Everyone was sitting there all quiet and talking in low tones. The reason the minister’d come was to tell us that our mayor, Mr. Vaissade, had just died, and the pastor was making the rounds to tell as many people as he knew would be interested.

Mr. Vaissade was an older man, and I don’t suppose his death was all that much of a shock. But he had been in church with us just three or four hours earlier, and now suddenly was dead. He’d collapsed right on his own front porch after walking back to town from church, and was found lying there by a neighbor an hour later.

Although we all liked Mr. Vaissade, we weren’t close friends, so his passing away like he did wasn’t in itself an event that changed everything for me or for our family. But it turned out to have a huge effect on the future of the town, and an even bigger effect on our family.

Mr. Vaissade had been mayor of Miracle Springs for a year and a half. I don’t think during all that time I heard of one thing in particular that his mayoring had done or changed. He just was the mayor, and everybody went on about their business as usual. Maybe he had to sign papers or something, but I never heard anything about it, and didn’t really see what difference having a mayor made to Miracle Springs.

But folks had gotten kind of used to the idea of having a mayor, and almost immediately talk began to stir up about who was going to replace him. Miracle was a respectable town now. Including all the folks round about in the foothills and farms and ranches for several miles around town, there were fifteen hundred or two thousand people, and the area was growing back into the kind of size it’d boasted right after the first gold strikes. No town of the importance of Miracle Springs, they said, could be without a mayor. And in addition, political fever was in the air that summer of 1856 after Mr. Vaissade’s death.

California had changed so much, even in the four years we had been there. We were by now among the old-timers, the early settlers in the West. For the first several years, just about everybody coming to California from out East was coming because of the gold. Right at first it was the gold miners themselves, then later the people like the Parrishes and others—businessmen and suppliers and merchants and others who hoped to make a living because of the gold rush, though they may not have been directly involved themselves.

But by now, people were pouring into the West to settle it and live here, just because there was space and freedom and adventure, and because they heard the land was good. Schools and churches were being built all over the state, and thousands of families were putting down roots. Farmers were turning the valleys into land that produced food. Cities and towns were growing. Railroads joined the different parts of California, and there was even talk of a railroad someday to hook up California with the rest of the states back East.

California wasn’t the only place that was growing. People were coming west—the whole west. California’d been made a state in 1850, and by this time there was lots of talk that Oregon would be the next new state. Settlers were coming across the Oregon Trail by the thousands.

It wasn’t only because of all the new people coming west that folks were more interested in politics that year. In the only other election since California’d been in the union, statehood had been so fresh and the gold rush so much on people’s minds that folks just didn’t pay that much attention. After all, Washington, D.C. was thousands of miles away, and Californians didn’t figure it made much difference whether they voted for Franklin Pierce from New Hampshire or General Winfield Scott.

But now in 1856, everything was different!

A new political party, the Republicans, had been formed only a couple of years earlier. The issue of slavery, though not really involving California too much, was still talked about, because the new party was more or less based on anti-slavery. I suppose Californians were interested in the Republican party too because one of the state’s most well-known men, John Charles Fremont, was one of the leaders in getting it established. Fremont was rich from the gold that had been discovered on his huge estate. He had been one of the first explorers to California, had fought the Mexicans, and was one of the first new senators in 1850 right after California became a state. All in all, John Fremont was the most famous Californian there was.

And now, for the presidential election of 1856, the new Republican party had chosen John Fremont as their nominee.

That made all of California stand up and take notice of national politics. Now it made a big difference who people voted for—James Buchanan from far-away Pennsylvania, or John Fremont from California! We may have been the newest of the Union’s thirty-one states, but all of a sudden we were one of the most important.

“Why, just think of it,” everyone was saying, “a Californian in the White House!” That election of 1856 was just about the biggest thing to hit California since the discovery of gold!

John Fremont was one of those kinds of men that not everyone liked. When people talked about the election, lots of folks like Alkali Jones didn’t have that much nice to say about him. But one thing was for sure—he was our John Fremont . . . from our own state! And folks figured that made him worth voting for no matter what else they thought.

So politics and John Fremont and Washington, D.C., and slavery and Republicans and Democrats were all topics in the air and on people’s minds and lips that summer.

And as part of all that, and maybe because of it, almost immediately after Mr. Vaissade’s death, folks started saying Miracle Springs needed to have an election for mayor.