We traveled in elegance on the Central Pacific. Our Silver Palace car had dazzling white-metal interiors, spacious berths, private sitting and smoking rooms. Johnny was deep in laudanum-induced slumber as we stopped at stations scattered across the desert like rocks. Water lay in stagnant ponds so alkaline that cattle wouldn’t touch them unless they were dying of thirst. Because alkali ruined boilers, special water trains had to run daily to supply the stations.
With no scenery to look at, passengers turned to each other to pass time. Jackson and Colbourn were in another car now—we exchanged nods at station breaks—and Johnny and I were sandwiched between two excursion groups. One consisted of ruddy Englishmen packing a small arsenal. They talked incessantly of the game they expected to kill.
The other group, merchants and wives, was from Washington. One of the Washington men came over just after Johnny had taken the last of his laudanum and nodded off again. In soft southern accents he said his name was Kramer. I got the feeling he was glad to escape his group—or maybe just his wife. A baseball enthusiast, he was curious about Harry and the Stockings. He responded to my questions about wartime tensions in the capital with anecdotes in which Lincoln figured as a buffoon. A staunch Democrat, he had little use for the martyred president or his ruinous policies.
“What about Grant?” I asked.
“A common drunk, glorified for butchery. The Radicals have him in their pocket.” Kramer paused. “Have you followed gold?”
Only to Elmira, I thought. “No, why?”
“One in our party is close to Grant’s son-in-law.” He pursed his lips. “Close enough to hear things.”
“Like what?”
“He’s buying gold fast as he can.”
“Why? Does Grant set the price?”
“No, it fluctuates in the open market. But what Grant does—or doesn’t do—influences that market. Two groups are competing for his support: ‘bulls,’ who invest heavily in gold shares and oppose all printing of greenbacks; and ‘bears,’ who own millions in paper currency and fight anything that boosts gold—such as its greater use for money. Each group constantly lobbies the government.”
“What’s Grant done?”
“That’s the point. Absolutely nothing. Everybody is waiting for him to take a position.”
I thought for a moment. “So if you knew in advance, you’d clean up?”
“That knowledge would be of truly inestimable value to an investor.”
“And so Grant’s son-in-law—”
“—is obtaining all the gold he can,” Kramer finished. “A consortium of powerful buyers is driving the price higher. People with gold certificates are getting rich.”
“What’s the risk?”
“Only one thing could ruin it: if Grant instructed the treasury to release gold reserves, deflating the market.”
“That won’t happen?”
Kramer shook his head. “He’s so sick of being yammered at that he’s privately decided to let the bulls and bears fight to the finish, then set his policy.”
Johnny groaned and shifted in his sleep, his hand hurting him again. I worked a cushion beneath it. He was sweating. I fanned him until his breathing deepened.
“What if some of the big buyers dumped their shares?” I said. “Wouldn’t that collapse the whole thing?”
“You grasp these matters quickly,” he said. “The consortium’s agreement is not to sell any shares whatsoever until gold reaches two hundred dollars.”
“Where’s it now?”
“One thirty-seven. Only two days ago it was one thirty-three.”
“So it’s already started.”
He nodded solemnly.
“Are you in?” I asked.
“With everything I own,” he said cheerfully. “Already I’m richer by fourteen thousand. If I cared to sell, that is, which I certainly do not. Keep your eye on things the next few days. There’s still time to make yourself a pile. Chance of a lifetime. And the more that go in, naturally, the bigger the profits for us all.”
“I see.”
He looked to the front of the car. “Pardon,” he said, with little discernible joy. “My wife requires me.”
After that, whenever our eyes met, Kramer winked.
Elko, Nevada, was supposed to be only a supper stop, but with our locomotive developing a “hot box”—an axle bearing overheating dangerously from friction—we limped in for a longer stay.
Like Promontory, Elko was booming. A large Chinese settlement lent it a different tone, but esthetically it still had a long way to go. The ever-present alkali dust swirled in head-high clouds, stirred by mule trains and eight-horse stages clattering off to the White Pines silver mines.
Johnny stayed in our car to rest, his appetite blunted by the laudanum. Most of the others headed for a hotel restaurant. I held back, having no stomach for more fried meat. I was about to buy some fruit from a vendor when a Chinese boy walked by. He wore the customary blue overshirt and pants, wooden clogs, and round hat from which a braided cue stretched nearly to his ankles. Looking at him, I had an inspiration.
“You wan’ my food?” he said incredulously when I overtook him. “Chinee food?”
I held out two silver dollars and nodded. He looked at them in astonishment. Meals along the CP ran a buck and a quarter. To a Chinese boy whose family lived on a fraction of what whites earned, my offering must have seemed a small fortune.
“Not ’nuff,” he said, eyeing me shrewdly. “Fo’ dollah!”
The little bandit! The trouble was that suddenly I was ravenous for Chinese food. I handed him two more dollars.
He led me through narrow packed-dirt alleys. I asked questions about the settlement and gathered that it consisted mainly of discharged CP workers. Groups moving along the alleys or standing and smoking cigarettes stared at us, the babble of their conversation slowing momentarily. I sensed no hostility, merely curiosity. There were no women anywhere in view. He led me inside a frame shack where I sat on the floor before a low bench.
The food was worth every penny: heaping bowls of steamed vegetables and rice, dumplings filled with spiced pork, succulent chicken and duck, and apple-shaped pastries coated with melted candy. I plied my chopsticks as fast as I could.
Onlookers surrounded the repair crew. The harried engineer said it would take several more hours to fix the axle. I had a mug of coffee in the station and picked up a day-old paper with the caption ACTIVITY IN WALL STREET'S GOLD ROOM. Volume was heavy and the price had risen from 139 to 141 dollars an ounce. Hadn’t Kramer said it was 137 dollars? I thought of Twain’s thousand dollars. Wouldn’t gold be more sensible than a flying machine?
I stopped by the telegraph desk. A boy about nineteen sat self-importantly behind the key.
“Anything about gold over the wire today?”
“You’re ’bout the hunderth to ask.”
“What’d you tell the other ninety-nine?”
“That’s a dandy!” He slapped his knee. “What’d you tell the other ninety-nine!”
I decided he was simple, not putting me on. “Do you know today’s closing price?”
“Up over one forty-two,” he said. “Everybody says it’s just the beginning.”
“I suppose you’re in too,” I said.
“Would if I had the cash.” He grinned. “I know who has jumped in on the sly.”
“Who?”
“Mrs. Grant, that’s who.”
Was the first family really so flagrant, I wondered, that every yokel in the Nevada desert knew their business?
I drank two more coffees and watched the uninspired panhandling of several ragged Sochoche Indians. Then I walked back to the train. The moon was just beginning to climb over the horizon. I took a gold eagle from my pocket and stared at it. It gleamed with the reflected radiance of ten thousand stars overhead.
Reno was the CP point nearest the fabulous Comstock mines, which for the past decade had channeled limitless millions through San Francisco into the world. The place was well-equipped for financial dealing. After breakfast I found a Wells Fargo office on North Virginia, where I learned that already the price of gold had risen fifty cents that morning. That decided me. With fourteen hundred dollars of my letter of credit, I purchased a certificate for ten ounces of gold.
I hurried back to the station thinking that the few times in my life I’d tried slot machines, I’d never hit for more than a handful of quarters. This time the jackpot would be bigger. Much bigger.
With a second locomotive attached to our train—doubling the noise and smoke—we moved out of the Nevada basin upward into the pine-sloped Sierras. I saw yellow wildflowers that reminded me of backpacking trips I'd made near Tahoe. As we crossed the California border I felt my heart beat faster. This was home.
Evergreens covered the mountains like shaggy blankets, broken only by the log chutes used by timber crews to stockpile quick-hewn railroad ties. We climbed the twisting canyon of the Truckee and came upon a magnificent view of Donner Lake. Predictably, guidebook accounts of the ill-fated Donner Party, embellished with grotesque details, echoed through the car.
Near Cisco we lunged into darkness. The train butch laughed at our startled reactions. Lighting the car’s lamps, he informed us we were in snowsheds extending the next fifty miles.
“Just when we get country worth seeing,” Johnny said.
Snow here didn’t drift like eastern snows, but lay in mammoth caps. The CP, at a cost of twenty thousand dollars per mile, was enclosing everything. Stations, tracks, water tanks, woodsheds, turntables, stalls for locomotives—all were to be roofed over before next winter’s paralyzing storms. Fortunately for us, sections remained where we could see through unfinished walls.
At almost every station Indians, mostly Shoshones and Paiutes, climbed in and out of the baggage cars. One Paiute chief stalked through our car in stately fashion with a blue blanket draped around his shoulders and a ragged black hat on his head. The CP, tiring of attacks on its crews and trains, had showed more acumen than the UP by issuing free passes to tribal leaders; hostilities ceased immediately.
From the snowsheds only a hundred miles remained to Sacramento. Half of it was a roller coaster of straining ascents, breath-squeezing curves, and stomach-wrenching descents. Brakemen ran atop the cars spinning the brake wheels—air brakes didn’t exist yet—adjusting to prevent the cars picking up too much speed. Or separating from each other due to uneven braking. Or going into a skid if wheels overheated from friction. Only two brakemen worked the entire length of bumping cars. Their thudding feet overhead reminded us how close we were to catastrophe.
We careened through Blue Canon and Dutch Flat and Gold Run, halted at Cape Horn to look down a dizzying abyss at the American River, a green ribbon two thousand feet below. We thundered through another stretch of snowsheds, where, reflected in the windows of workers’ houses, I saw our axle boxes smoking and our wheels glowing like fiery discs.
After hours of it we finally leveled off and emerged into the brilliant sunshine of the Sacramento Valley. At our next stop we sniffed the air and gazed around in wonder at flower-strewn meadows watered by curving streams. After the desert wastes and the Sierra chill, it all seemed like paradise. We stood silently. Insects buzzed. Birdsong floated around us.
“We did it” somebody said. “Crossed the whole blessed country.”
A woman started singing “America.”
I have to admit it gave me a rush, goose bumps and all, as the rest joined in. Johnny and I sang too.
“Hurrah for the Union!” came the shout.
Simply by making the trip I felt I had achieved something powerful. I think we all felt it.
We rolled along Front Street toward the CP terminal, boggling at the sight of thousands of blooms. The guidebooks called Sacramento “Flower City” and “Queen City of the Plain.” I’d forgotten the lushness of California’s river valleys. In a single mile we passed orchards and fields teeming with apricots, cherries, apples, blackberries, strawberries, oranges, and peaches.
The dome of the state capitol reflected tracers of sunlight in the distance. Carpenters and gilders swarmed over it like so many ants. Somebody said it was nearly ready for occupancy.
“Who’s governor?” I asked.
Nobody knew.
We moved along the oak-bordered river, where Central Pacific yards were heaped with rails and ties, and idled into a huge new twenty-nine-stall brick roundhouse. It was landscaped with eucalyptus saplings recently introduced from Australia. Funny to see for myself that the trees of my youth hadn’t always been here.
We came to a halt.
And that was it. For many, this was the limit of their trip. They would visit Sutter’s Mill, perhaps journey to Yosemite, and return home to recount their adventures.
Those of us pushing on to San Francisco still had 120 miles before us. With no direct rail link, we had three choices: ride the Western Pacific, opened just two weeks ago, to Stockton, then connect with Alameda and take a ferry across the bay; train to Vallejo and board a steamer; or journey by water all the way down the Sacramento.
From the ticket agent I learned that the Stockings had passed through earlier that afternoon.
“What a fuss!” he exclaimed. “Hundreds jostling to see, all the bigwigs on hand. Them with their little red stockings on their coats, fit and handsome. Why, that Harry’s Wright’s the very picture of a man!”
I agreed that Harry was and asked which route they’d taken.
“Steamed on the riverboat Capitol, their flag trailing out behind ’em in the breeze. A grand sight!”
“Can I catch them tonight?”
“Not ’till way after dark. Trip takes nine hours. Last boat leaves in a few minutes.”
I started to turn away. “Oh, you hear anything about gold today?”
“Heard a whole lot,” he said, grinning. “Got shares myself. Price jumped two dollars, up to one forty-five.”
I grinned back. Today’s increase on my modest holdings would more than cover the steamer tickets. I wished I’d bought more shares. Gold was a long way from two hundred an ounce, but things were moving fast.
Johnny and I stood on the deck of the stern-wheeler Yosemite beneath a black plume of coal smoke, watching the bank pass by lazily. A rust-red sunset tinted the river.
“You’re quiet, Sam,” said Johnny. “You got feelings about coming home?”
I didn’t have an answer. I was definitely feeling something: a ball in my stomach seemed to combine expectancy and apprehension. Maybe dread. It was one thing to go off in time and geographical distance. It was another to come back to face the reality that “home” did not exist.
We slid past Benicia, its boatworks and fort barely visible in the darkness. We churned the dark waters of the Carquinez Strait between low treeless banks, and moved into San Pablo Bay. Finally we rounded San Rafael Point and were in San Francisco Bay. My chest tightened as I peered into the blackness.
Tiny lights glowed on a cluster of distant hills. I was confused by darkness to their right, where I was used to seeing the Golden Gate Bridge, but then I recognized the black humps of Angel and Alcatraz islands, and I knew where I was. I watched silently as the city’s night-draped hills drew gradually closer. Sensing something wrong, Johnny stepped close and for a moment gripped my arm with his good hand.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt lonelier in my life.