Then one day word reached Santa Fe that gold had been struck on Cherry Creek in Colorado, right in that area what Charley always talked about. From a bum he turned into quite a hero. He could have drunk free on it for some time, and immediately got all kinds of offers to head the expeditions that started to outfit at once. But soon as he was vindicated, Charley become uppity. “Go pound sand up the aperation of your hindquarters,” he told them others. “It was Shunny here who give me refreshment, and it be him I’ll make rich.”
It wasn’t until well into the fall of ’58 that we got to Colorado after a wearing trip, for on the way we was raided by Apache and I took an arrow in my leg, fell down, and knocked myself out. When I come to, our horses and mules was gone and the cantina owner’s cousins as well. “They go under?” I asked old Charley, who appeared all right himself, just setting there rubbing his toothless gums with a finger while his rheumy eyes was fixed on the horizon.
“Oh,” says he, “I had to deliver them over to the Apache. It didn’t enthrall me with pleasure to do it, but you and me would never reach the gold if I hadn’t.”
Like most of the border Indians, the Apache had a peculiar grudge against Mexicans. So as to be able to kill the three cousins in some excruciating manner, they had let me and Charley go. He was a treacherous old goat, I think you will agree. And while I should maybe have thanked him, the result was I got very little sleep thereafter, for now we had nobody extra to give away if the need occurred but me. And I was wounded, not serious but for a time I couldn’t do no running.
We did not encounter any more Indians, but our gear was gone now and our guns, so all we could bring down in the way of game was rattlesnake, by club, which however wasn’t the worst victual in the world providing you could knock it dead without prejudicing yourself.
Charley was supposed to know the territory, but had forgot it owing to his years of drinking. His memory could have come back, he said, with a drink of spirits, but we didn’t have none of course. I myself would have settled for a drink of muddy water by the time we was wandering hopelessly in the Great Sand Dune area of southern Colorado. We would sure have died there had not that party trailing us come to our rescue.
You must have got the point by now: Charley was the world’s worst prospector. He just didn’t know his profession. That was a revelation to me. I had thought if a fellow practiced a trade, he would naturally be good at it. But that ain’t true. He can be awful at it all his life.
In our condition at the time they found us, we couldn’t very well refuse to let that party throw in with us, and we at last arrived at Cherry Creek just as winter set in. The rest of the world had got there before us, owing to newspaper accounts all across the country. There was about eighty cabins already built, and in case you don’t know it that was the start of Denver, Colorado, though they called it Auraria for the first couple years.
I got no intention of going into detail on the luck we had at prospecting for gold. Near as I can gather, all gold strikes is about the same: somebody pans a little dust, has to shoot off his mouth about it, so that thousands of others come rushing to the place, no single individual gets much owing to the congestion, and then finally some big outfit buys up most of the claims and makes a business of it with the proper machinery. Those who come out best are them who service those what are looking for the gold: the fellows that set up stores and saloons, etc., for early in the game they can get whatever they charge and have their bundle made by the time the smoke clears.
The following spring and summer there was supposed to have been a hundred and fifty thousand come to Colorado along the Platte, the Arkansas, and the Smoky Hill rivers. That was the time of PIKE’S PEAK OR BUST painted on the sides of wagons, for a lot of them had to announce it in that stupid way, then two-thirds went on back home by the end of the year, at which time they printed BUSTED, BY GOD below the other slogan.
Me and that bunch of ours, we tried gold for a while, got us a claim, even built a sluiceway real scientific, for there was seven or eight of us, but it didn’t pay off much. Oh, there was gold there, we got out seventy-eighty dollars’ worth of dust in three months and only used up about a hundred dollars’ worth of pick handles and shovels, and didn’t have no time to hunt, so had to buy food that would have been cheaper at the finest hotel in St. Louie, and then most of the gold we derived from that effort was spent by Charley for whiskey and one of the Mexicans for whores, for you take the latter, they appear at every gold strike shortly after the first nugget is found.
But some of us was too shrewd to go on long at that sort of thing: I don’t mean me, I never knew anything about business, but a couple of them fellows, John Bolt and Pedro Ramirez, they organized a general store shortly and set up a regular supply train down to Santa Fe and back for goods, and I was wagonmaster of it. We did all right and made a nice piece of money which was divided up amongst the three of us left from the original crowd, for a couple others was killed in saloon arguments and Charley disappeared. He turned out to have gone back to Santa Fe, where he hung around the cantina again talking of the old days in Colorado and mooched drinks, and slept with the hogs.
Even though that regular trip would have put me in the range of Estrellita again, that worked out all right for she had herself another man by the first time I come back down the trail. She also had herself a new kid-which might have been mine for all I know, but I was real irresponsible in them days, being only seventeen myself. If so, and if he’s still alive, he’d be only about ninety-four today.
It was during this period that I bought myself a horse, an Indian pony in fact is what he was, and pinto, but I got him off some white fellows who come to Denver with a herd of them. I also procured my first handgun, a Colt’s Dragoon, cap-and-ball, and I practiced with it on the run to Santa Fe till I was good enough to eat no man’s dirt and stay alive, which ain’t easy when you are my size: it must have been along in these years that I growed to five foot four and stopped forever. I got a pair of built-up boots made to my measure in Santa Fe that added two inches onto that, and I also wore a Mex sombrero with a high crown: it was black and trimmed with silver. In outline I was six foot tall, but quite a bit of that was air.
Not far from the white settlements in early Denver was a big camp of Arapaho, who as you know was close friends of the Cheyenne, and occasionally little parties of the Human Beings themselves would troop through the vicinity. I didn’t see anybody I knew, but on the other hand I never looked very hard. I don’t know why I should have had this disinclination, for I was white and doing what whites are supposed to, but the fact was that I felt kind of shameful as regards the Indians.
I would be feeling right good and then see a little band of redskins riding along and fall into melancholy. I could never remember how shabby Indians was until I saw some. Not because they was always poor; there was something awfully seedy about an Indian when he was by his lights dressed to the nines. Old Lodge Skins in his best turn-out looked like something the cat drug in by white standards. Now I never noticed this much till I had been to the Missouri settlements and back.
Our store was first in a tent and then as business grew, we built us a wooden structure, and in between the Santa Fe trips I’d be around there for a spell. Some of the Arapaho got to dropping by with skins to trade, and game if they had any extra. And that’s when I noticed how much an Indian stunk. Get three of them indoors and you could hardly breathe for the aroma. We just couldn’t tolerate their presence inside the wood building, so the Indian trade was carried on outside in an open shed. Their goods wasn’t worth much anyway; by the time they got around to bringing in a haunch of fresh venison, it was half-spoiled and crawling with maggots, and the hides was poorly dressed and stiff as lumber.