September 30, 1852
Goosetown
“Come with me. I got something to make us rich,” Penn told Maggie after the excitement had settled down. The men had unloaded the wagons and turned out the oxen and were preparing a party, while the women had retired to primp a little. Men had moved out of a dozen of the nicest cabins and turned them over to the women. They had board floors and beds made of logs that were covered with pine boughs and buffalo robes and stood back among the pine trees, away from the frenzied mining activity. The women could use them as long as they liked, and the first couple that married would receive one as a wedding present.
Goosetown was nothing like the bucolic rural towns of Illinois that the women had left behind. Most of the homes were crude—tents or cabins of raw logs chinked with mud. There was no evidence of refinement—no curtains or flower boxes at the windows, no signs of paint. The stream that ran through the diggings had been dug up in the search for gold, and the banks were lined with piles of rocks and sand. Mining equipment littered the land. The sun was out, and the crooked streets were muddy with snowmelt. A general store charging usurious prices occupied an enormous tent, and half a dozen saloons were set up in dirt-floored cabins. There was a hodgepodge of other enterprises—a barbershop, a smithy, a Chinese herb shop, and a washhouse among them.
Still, if the landscape was raw and the air filled with shouts and curses, there was a contagious sense of excitement and hope. Maggie felt revived after the long trip. This valley, surrounded by mountains, was a new land, a place to start over.
She and Penn hurried to where the two reverends stood watching several men recover gold from a sluice box. Both ministers were sipping from tin cups. “You were right, Willie. I came near selling my soul for this coffee,” Reverend Swain told his brother-in-law.
Penn turned up the hem of her dress and pulled out a basting stitch. She removed a folded piece of paper, wrinkled and torn in spots, from its hiding place and unfolded it, smoothing it with her hand. “Here,” she said to Joseph. “You take it.”
Maggie stared at the paper, curious.
“I bought it of a man in St. Joe. I told Asa it was give to me, but I paid five dollars for it. He wanted more, but it was all I had. He said I was a nice girl, and as he was dying and couldn’t go back to California, he wanted me to have it. Asa didn’t pay no hundred dollars for it. He lied. I was the one bought it. Asa stole it from me, but I took it back when I run off in St. Joe. That’s what them Harvey boys was after. It’s genuine.”
“Genuine what?” Joseph asked.
“A map. A map to a gold mine. I was going to keep it for myself, but after what we gone through, I figured we all ought to share. It’s a fortune.” Penn beamed at the minister.
William, who had been concentrating on the gold extraction instead of listening to Penn, glanced at the map and smiled. “A fortune?”
“She paid five dollars for it,” Maggie told him.
William turned to Penn. “You what?”
“The man sold it to me wanted more, but it was all I had. It was the money I saved up for three years. I sewed that map in my skirt and walked most of two thousand miles with it. It’s genuine.”
“Genuine like this?” William took a similar map from his vest pocket and unfolded it. “There were hundreds peddled in ’49. I paid two bits for it and kept it to remind myself I’d been suckered. I guess folks still get taken in.”
Penn stared at him, her mouth open. “You mean it ain’t real?”
“No more than a thousand others that have been sold along the way.”
“The map was what Asa and his brothers were after,” Maggie said.
“That man promised me it was genuine,” Penn told him. “He promised me.”
William studied the map, then handed it back. “The X there that shows where the mine is—that is the middle of the ocean.”
“Then it ain’t real?”
William shook his head. “I am sorry.”
Penn crumpled the map and dropped it in the mud. “I should have give that worthless thing back to Asa. Them Harvey boys is dead because of it.” Penn stomped off.
TO MAGGIE’S SURPRISE, few of the women were anxious to marry right away. They took their time choosing husbands. They had become too independent to rush into matrimony, and while they had come west as brides, some were not sure they even wanted to marry.
Dora was the first to find a husband. She sat one day with Maggie on a log in the sun, her infant in her lap. As the two women rested, a man came up and asked, “Would you let me hold the baby? It has been a long time since I have touched a little one. I have washed my hands.” He held them out for Dora’s inspection.
Dora tightened the blanket around Washoe, then gave her to the man. He cradled the infant in his arms as if he knew what he was doing. He looked down at Dora and said, “I had a wife and son once, but they perished.”
“That is Washoe—Wash for short,” Dora said. Then she added, “She is not rightly mine. She was given to me. My own died.”
“You are blessed to have her.” The baby cried a little, and the man shushed her and rocked her in his arms. Then, reluctantly, he handed her back to Dora. “I hope you find a father for her. He would be a lucky man to acquire a wife and daughter on the same day.” When Dora didn’t reply, he said, “You are a widow, then.”
Dora looked him full in the face. “I never was married.”
Maggie touched Dora’s hand. She was proud of her friend for speaking the truth.
The man took in the meaning of what Dora had said. “Out here, what matters is the worth of a person, man or woman. This is the place to start a new life.” He and Dora talked for a long time. At last he said, “We are told the women are to choose their husbands.”
“What do you think?” Dora asked Maggie.
Maggie nodded.
“I have a ring,” Dora said, holding up her hand. Baby Wash’s mother’s ring rested on her finger.
Maggie rose, giving her seat to the man. Later in the day, she stood beside Dora as her friend recited her wedding vows.
PENN BORROWED A gold pan from a burly miner, who showed her how to swirl the water in it and look for specks of gold. “I bought a map to a gold mine in St. Joe,” she admitted to him.
He grinned at her. “Me the same. Give a ten-dollar gold piece for it.”
“Mine was five. That makes you the bigger fool,” she said.
He laughed. “I guess I am.”
“Asa would have struck me dead for saying that,” Penn told Maggie, when she confided she had found her man. “I told him I wouldn’t live with him unless the words was spoke over us. He said he was of a similar mind.”
“I believe he could stand up to Reed Harvey,” Maggie told her.
“I ain’t worrying about them Harvey boys no more.” In fact, Penn did not have to. Sometime after that, an emigrant told her that he had attended the hanging of Reed Harvey in Great Salt Lake City.
WHEN SHE LOOKED over the camp with all its single men, Sadie told Maggie, “I could make a fortune if I returned to my old ways.” Then she added, “I do not care about a fortune. I came here for a husband, and I intend to find one.” She was studying herself in a mirror and frowned. “I have gotten old.”
Maggie shook her head. “You were pretty when we left Chicago, the prettiest among us. The trail has given your face character. Now you are beautiful.”
“Beautiful enough for Davy Rupe?”
Maggie grinned. “If you can tear him away from Winny.”
“I would not want to.”
Winny acted as both maid of honor and best man when Sadie married Davy.
Winny herself never married. She lived with Davy and Sadie for the rest of her life, a beloved aunt to their children. “I came west to find my brother,” she told Maggie once. “I found him and a sister, too. Why do I need a husband?”
BESSIE DID NOT appear to be interested in any of the Goosetown men. A number of them approached the cabin to inquire about Evaline, but she told them the girl was too young to marry. “You have found no one among the miners to your liking?” Maggie asked one day as they walked along a creek where men were working sluice boxes in their search for gold. Several stopped what they were doing to stare at the women.
“Oh, I have,” Bessie said.
Maggie smiled a little. “Of course. Does he know?”
“Not yet.”
They came to the temporary chapel where the weddings had taken place. It had been many days since the women arrived, and by then the ministers had performed two dozen weddings. William saw the women and came over to them.
“Bessie has made a choice,” Maggie said.
“A fortunate man. Who is he?” William asked.
Bessie turned to Maggie and said, “You are too forward.”
“One of us has to be.” It was not her place to intrude, but she feared Bessie had turned timid. Maggie said to Reverend Parnell, “I believe Bessie would marry a man of God.”
“A preacher?” William frowned. Then his eyes widened. “I know of only one among us who is unmarried. But he is not much of a man of God now.” He looked at Bessie. “You have seen my weaknesses over these past months. I am unworthy of you.”
“I have seen a man, a good man in almost all ways. I would not want perfection. It would be too difficult to live with such a person. I would like someone with flaws, just as I am flawed.”
“I find it difficult to believe that about you. You are a kind and generous woman.”
“I have lived a life of deception.”
William frowned. “And you are overburdened with it.”
“I am. And worse, I have burdened another. I intend to make amends by telling her the truth.” William studied Bessie as she faltered and glanced back toward the cabin where she and Evaline were staying. Evaline sat with Blackie, drawing in her sketchbook. Maggie smiled at the scene, remembering that Evaline had promised to find a dog for Clara when they reached California.
Bessie took a deep breath. “I will tell you first. Evaline is not my charge. She is my daughter. My first husband was a Negro. So you see, I am a deceiver. You may think I am unworthy of you.” She took a deep breath and went on. “My second husband knew of Evaline’s parentage and loved her as if she were his own. But I never told Evaline. I intend to do so now. Before the day ends I hope she will call me mother. I will tell everyone. I know it will shock them—and you.”
William smiled at her. “No shock to me. I suspected as much.”
“You did?” Bessie’s eyes widened. “Any man I marry would have to accept her as his daughter, too.”
“I find that no hardship, but a blessing. You see, my wife, Anne, was a Negro.”
MAGGIE HAD BEEN approached by several men who wanted to marry her, but they did not interest her. As she walked one day along the creek, watching the men work the diggings, she was thinking she might set up a dressmaking shop. The women she had come west with certainly needed clothes, and the men had plenty of gold dust in their pokes. She stopped to observe a man who was bent over a gold pan. A boy of about five worked beside him. She stared at the two until the boy looked up and grinned. “Papa,” he said to his father, then pointed at Maggie.
The man stood up. “You are one of those women,” he said.
Maggie nodded. “I have not seen you before.”
“No, I did not think any of the woman would want to take on two children.” He glanced behind him, and Maggie noticed a second boy barely beyond babyhood. The child reached out his arms, and Maggie yearned to pick him up, but it was the man who lifted him into the air. “Their mother is dead.”
“Not want to take on two children?” Maggie repeated the man’s words. “I can think of nothing so joyous.” She reached into a bag she carried and took out Clara’s doll. Winny had given it to her when they reached the diggings, and she had kept it with her. She handed it to the older boy.
“I am Robert Kane,” the man said.
“I am Maggie Hale.” She should have told her real name, but she was no longer Maggie Kaiser. Maggie Kaiser was dead—just like Jesse Kaiser.
“Will you sit?” he asked.
“I would rather play with the children,” she replied, and Robert handed her the younger boy. “He is Ezra. The older one is Jeff,” he said.
After a time, she took Evaline’s drawing of Clara from the bag and showed it to Robert. “I had a daughter once,” she said. “And a son.” Then she added, “I tried to kill their father, but I did not. He is dead, however.”
“I am sorry for you.”
“He was a cruel man. I do not grieve for him.”
“You have that right.”
Maggie was cautious. She wanted to be sure before she opened her heart to another man. She made Robert wait a week before she proposed to him.