Rollin Ridge
West Desert, Utah
July 1851
B
irds rarely sing in the summer desert. The mirrored heat rolling across the glistening sand told them there would be little food to find, nothing but futility on the parched journey. Unlike pleasing birdsong, man complains his lot until he can speak no more—until his throat is so dry under the kerchief, he cannot stand his voice for blame.
Imperfect as I am, I’ve come this far, surviving on defiant might alone. But this journey to the goldfields, one to escape Chief Ross’ vengeance, was not my choice. Leaving Lizzie was not my choice. Papa said a man had no choices when his prospect of gain was nigh. But, regardless of my wants, I’d receive no fair trial on Cherokee land for killing Kell, even though the man’s soul was seared long before.
Dawn on the eastern horizon woke me, lit my face, and startled me awake. I sat straight up, panicked with an unconscious desire to return to Cherokee Nation in the East, followed by the waking knowledge I might never hear its waterfalls again. I dreamed of home, but my recollection was only in remembrance of leaving with the sun at our backs. Aeneas and Wacooli slept still, so I took advantage of the quiet dawn with no immediate task to occupy me.
As the sun peeked down the day, with renewed sight to scratch words, I pulled pen and parchment from the roll under my head, uncorked the ink, and began a letter home. My passions rose with my pen, but the words felt like a burning thrust of vomitus bile from my stomach. One loses an appetite for poetry when reason surfaces a truth better left latent.
Mother,
It is with pleasure that I sit down to write and relieve what I know must be your significant burden to hear from your wandering children torn from you, as they are, cast into the depths, as they so feel. Each morning they rise, then lay down, weary, on this strange and distant land each night. Believe me, it is no ordinary thing to come to California. We three men add insignificantly to the crowd of thousands who travel there, testified by common golden dreams.
This journey for gold costs far more than I reckoned it could. With a quarter due at every bridge over every mud-hole, five dollars lost for each different river we ferried, two hundred and fifty for the purchase of a pack mule or horse. We have less remaining than I would have hoped. Shoeing a horse is four dollars a head. The Mormons charge a steep toll for the road to Salt Lake City. Cured beef costs twelve and a half cents per pound, and the flour is twice as much. I’m shelled, nearly out of money.
As we are crossing the desert, now arrives a tug of war. We expect to reach Sacramento in twenty-five days.
We’ll be eating dried beef, which is not very good. Sleeping without shelter is worse—.2
Aeneas rose and stretched his back, blocking dawn’s light from my periphery, taking me from my complaints. He kicked Wacooli’s boot to wake him, poured water from our stores into our coffee pot, and placed it over last night’s still-warm coals.
It only took a few moments for them to pack up camp, and they did so in silence. Aeneas’ first words came from an unused throat. “Horses and mules loaded, Rollin. Quit scratching to Lizzie and take these.” Aeneas handed me a cup of weak coffee first, and leather reins second.
I only accepted the coffee. “This letter is to Mama.”
“You done being mad at her?”
I didn’t answer. But saying Lizzie’s name prompted my hand to reach into my pocket for a crinkled piece of parchment. Aged and weathered these three years, the unfinished poem remained incomplete, paper soft and falling apart, knowing myself to be far more feral now than when I started it.
Aeneas said, “If you told Mama the truth, you better write her another. She doesn’t need to wring her hands any more than she’s already doing. Make it sound like our saddlebags are as full as our bellies. Don’t tell her about the wagon.” Aeneas slapped his jenny mule’s reins on his thigh. “If you’re honest, she’ll want us home the minute she reads it. The truth would turn her hair all white.”
Aeneas’ fortune-telling was correct, but I wouldn’t lie. I folded the incomplete letter and put the cork on my ink. Drops and dregs from the bitter chicory coffee in my tin cup fell into cracks in the ground, absorbed and faded like a watermark. I took the reins, wrapped the nib pen, ink well, and unfinished letter inside my saddlebag. I’d complete it when we stopped traveling this evening. Posting it would take longer. If Kit Carson and John Fremont found our bones in the center of the West Desert, crisp, beside arcing, bare mule ribs, and searched my pockets, at least Mama and Lizzie might read of the events leading to our demise.
Time accompanied our passing through the underworld during the driest month my memory could recall. Our horses were saddled instead of hitched. We abandoned the wagon, as had so many others. Empty from depleted supplies, its rectangular base turned gray and died—damaged beyond repair, with fractured axle, rimless wheels, and broken spokes.
Instead of other travelers along this desert route, we’d found wagon carcasses, adding ours to the lot. Whether human corpses decayed inside, I couldn’t say. I didn’t stop to find out, ridding myself of guilt for not burying the dead. My body couldn’t have done it properly with so little water, not without following directly behind them.
As the afternoon waned, we dismounted and walked beside our thirsty animals. In the desert, a man’s horse becomes too weak to carry him. So, he travels on foot, closer to the dust, breathing and clogging his mind with villainous grains. Packs double their weight with worry, heavier with one last blanket of self-preservation. Yet, parched though he may be, his mind sings songs, like uprooted choruses from a withered elder, telling his trials to impatient warriors who already know the legend’s end.
Expanses of grass shrunk into patches, peeking through worn spots in the desert, like leg hair peeking through worn and holey farmhand pants. We found the pooled water brackish, the color of tea from iodine, salt mixing with sparse rainwater. It wasn’t potable for man or beast. With each disappointment from the lack of soluble water, our progress trickled, nearly stopping entirely.
The sway of horses and pack mules found their rhythm, sluggish though it was. Heat rippled across the sand to just repel back to us from wide mountain berths. Thorny bushes turned pale, a shade lighter than the sand at our feet, desperate for water deep in their roots. Snakes could not reach it and fled, finding no shade.
We pressed forward into the sun, past the mountains near Salt Lake. Each pull at the rim of our hats remained where it was stretched. Bandanas covered our mouths, eyes asquint, leaving each of us absent identity.
Aeneas coughed, attempting to break his silence, rallying saliva enough to articulate some question or another. One which I’d likely have no answer to. He said, “How are we gonna feed the horses, Rollin?”
I was right.
Wacooli answered behind me. “Anee, we’ll have to search for grass on foot and bring it to ‘em.”
From my brother’s response to Wacooli’s lack of enthusiasm, I knew Aeneas stewed in his thoughts. His concern for our animals was more about him than the beasts.
Aeneas said, “You know what I’m hungry for? Grandma’s fried bread, Mama’s glazed chicken, Honey’s pole beans boiled with fatback, and strawberry pie.”
“Damn it, Aeneas! Doesn’t do us any good thinking about it.” I took the fatal risk of putting my thoughts to voice while lingering in Aeneas’ conjured savory tastes. I bit my tongue and swallowed twice. “Aeneas, do you remember Papa asking Mama to take all the seeds out of his strawberries?”
“Nope. Too little. You can hold Papa in your thoughts better than me, Rollin. You’ve got more stock.”
When I didn’t answer right away, he asked, “What did Papa say?”
“Said they got stuck in his teeth, and she needed to remove them.”
“Did she throw something at him?” Aeneas smiled briefly and tried a laugh, but his throat was too dry to form the sound.
“No. She kissed him, as I remember it.”
The memory was as sweet as the fruit. Our lives were so predictable then, freedom through synchronicity. Running Waters will always be home, not the cabin in the West at Honey Creek, or Mama’s dogtrot in Fayetteville, but our home, Running Waters, in Cherokee Nation East, settled among valley lands in the foothills of the Appalachians.
My parent’s extensive farm stretched into the valley on a high hill, crowned with a fine grove of oak and hickory, with a large clear spring at its foot. The orchard was on the left, wheat and cornfields to the right, pastures of cows, goats on one side near the house, and sheep grazing on the other.3 Behind the house, the running spring gave our home its name. After Grandfather’s New Echota Treaty in 1835, we, too, would run over rock, slip on moss, and fall downhill with only brief plains to pool.
The ground whitened under our horse hooves, salted sand gathering in random odd-shaped lines. Only God could articulate their rhyme and reason. Boot tracks marked our path northwest. Each saunter brought another thought: some forward, most backward. Where we’d been, what we’d lost. My thoughts rambled without any respite.
Then my imagination envisioned my hands holding a gold pan. Swirling silt and dirt revealed glimmering rock underneath the water, like treasure from Poseidon’s wielding waterspouts. Gold.
This generation’s men weren’t the first to travel in search of it. Papa’s journal was stuffed with clippings from Elias’ Phoenix and Savannah newspapers, beginning in ‘28, with headlines reading ‘Gold in Dahlonega’. Nothing stopped the white invasion from that first rush, all searching for easy wealth. But those invading hordes found no deserts to overcome. The only things standing in their way were rolling hills sheltering abundant game and laughing rivers sparkling over smooth rocks.
At the time, the Cherokee rejected the white miner’s presence, speaking for the land itself. Our people didn’t own the ground, not in the same way invading whites read on deeds; instead, we belonged to it. Yet, Cherokee pleas for sovereignty lifted on the western wind, so far away that ignorant white settlers and their Congress couldn’t hear, leaving behind my father’s people as victims of the intimate crime.
Ridges were the only obstacles plaguing the white man’s quest. And when they arrived, clamoring with pan in hand, they filled their empty basins with Cherokee riches. White man’s decadent desires overruled his supposed Christianity. I felt hypocritical, knowing I committed the same crime against California natives.
Wacooli broke into my thoughts. “We’ve got to stop, find shelter from this heat.” His eyes were keen, surveying the vastness for any sheltering obtrusion, something to hide underneath. He didn’t give us time to protest and let go of his reins. He walked in an expanding circle with bowed legs, stretching his weary back near a patch of disembodied tumbleweeds. Then, shaking his head, he took off his hat and lay down under one, a momentary reprieve from the sun’s rays soaking into his dark face.
We followed him and found empathy with back pain released deep in our marrow. The horses stayed close while Aeneas and I repeated Wacooli’s stretch over so much waterless ground. In the slight, speckled shade, I lost sight of the past worries and imagined troubles ahead. In the present, my spine spasmed on the baked-hard sand, and I no longer cared.
When we woke, the vindictive sun slid behind the mountaintops, and the temperature turned brisk. Aeneas and Wacooli unpacked our flour, coffee pot, cured beef, and our only frying pan. We each drank our ration of water and ate the cursed dry beef, gristly with salt.
Then, sitting on my horse blanket, I returned to my letter under lantern light and blew into the nib of my pen, hoping grains of sand wouldn’t block the ink’s stream.
After traveling over vast sandy plains, traversing here and there, by steep mountains, all day at times to relieve our wearied beasts, having walked many hours, fatigued, worn-out, nearly dead, we’ve reached our “camping place”. We tugged away with our tired hands and legs in fixing the horses, searching high and low for grass, water, and wood, all of which we would frequently be compelled to walk for the distance of a mile or more (owing to the non-proximity of the grass). Then, at last, we sat down, faint and hungry, to strong fat meat that tasted like rust and a piece of bread that made the stomach retch with every swallow. Nothing is comfortable! Yet appetite so strong the stomach, loathed, still called for more.4
Oh, sweet such rest to him who faints upon the journey long and weary!
And scenes like this the traveler paints, while dying on the wayside weary.
Sad pilgrims o’er life’s desert, we, our tedious journey onward ever.5
Across the desert, Man shuffles and breathes in sand, clogging his mind. All the while, with each square boot toe forward, his ears spiral outward in wider circles, mind gyrating upward, hoping to hear birdsong. This desert is too quiet for me.
In all this silence, my mind reeled through memories of you and Papa, back to the spring at Running Waters. Fueled forward, swallowing tasteful memories, we press on to the inevitable surface, hoping to find buried gold in unchartered land where none have staked claim.
Rollin