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cooling him down, that could be a little tricky.”
The physician inserted a probe with a thermometer through the incision he’d just made. The mayor grimaced and looked over his shoulder. He wasn’t being squeamish, Ron knew, he was just making sure no townsfolk were approaching to witness the ghastly proceedings. Townsfolk or reporters. But it was still early, and the only witnesses were those who had a professional interest.
The mayor fixed his chief of police with a steely stare known to moviegoers around the world and instructed him in an equally familiar glacial whisper, “I want the bastard who did this.”
“Now, there’s an idea,” Ron responded blandly.
Clay Steadman had hired Ron Ketchum personally, and the chief respected the mayor. But unlike most people, Ron never really cared for Clay’s movies, or the way the mayor sometimes lapsed into dialogue from the silver screen.
The mayor’s ball-bearing gaze bore down on his chief of police, but he knew if there was one man in town — or anywhere else — he couldn’t stare down, it was Ron Ketchum.
“Let me know when you have something,” Clay told Ron.
“Yes, sir.”
“Nobody’s going to do this in my town and get away with it.”
More movie dialogue, Ron thought. But he agreed with the sentiment completely. Goldstrike was his town, too.
Chapter 4
In January, 1848, a carpenter named James Marshall, originally from New Jersey, was building a millrace for his partner, John Sutter, in California’s Coloma Valley when a gleaming pebble approximately half the size of a pea caught his eye. He stooped to pick it up. It was gold. By the fall of that year, gold was being sought and found in California from Tuolumne in the south to the Trinity River in the north — a distance of four hundred miles.
By 1849, word of the discovery of gold in California had spread across the United States and around the world, and the rush was on. In just that first year of the gold rush, more than ninety thousand people heard the news, imagined themselves wealthy, and abandoned their homes and former lives with scarcely a second thought or a backward glance.
And that was just the Americans. Additional thousands poured in from Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, Europe and even Australia.
Most of the gold seekers were the young, adventurous and desperate; an estimated 98% of them were male. A cottage industry of publishing guidebooks on how a traveler might find his way west sprang up. One such publication indicated an overland route from New Orleans to the Sierra that could be traversed in only thirty-six days — when the actual travel time was two hundred and sixteen days. Another suggested a southern route through Mexico that crossed “thickly settled country.” Instead, it passed through a killing desert and the territory of hostile Apaches. Of the almost ninety thousand who headed west in 1849, only forty thousand made it to the gold fields. Of those who did make it, 99% didn’t find enough gold to cover their expenses. All the best claims had been staked in 1848.
Still, the gold rush, far more than earlier agrarian migrations, was largely responsible for the development of the American West. It was the primary reason for the founding of the city of Denver. It was responsible for the direct admission of California to the Union in 1850, having been ceded to the United States by Mexico in 1848, just after the Sutter’s Mill find, but before the word got out. Congress didn’t bother with the usual requirement of California becoming a recognized territory first.
Besides finding gold, the other impetus to head west was the opportunity to “mine the miners.” At a time when the prevailing wage for a laborer was a dollar a day, jobs digging gold on someone else’s claim were being offered at a pay scale of ten to fifteen dollars per day. Simple labor had become a way to strike it at least moderately rich.
A not dissimilar thought occurred to a
The physician inserted a probe with a thermometer through the incision he’d just made. The mayor grimaced and looked over his shoulder. He wasn’t being squeamish, Ron knew, he was just making sure no townsfolk were approaching to witness the ghastly proceedings. Townsfolk or reporters. But it was still early, and the only witnesses were those who had a professional interest.
The mayor fixed his chief of police with a steely stare known to moviegoers around the world and instructed him in an equally familiar glacial whisper, “I want the bastard who did this.”
“Now, there’s an idea,” Ron responded blandly.
Clay Steadman had hired Ron Ketchum personally, and the chief respected the mayor. But unlike most people, Ron never really cared for Clay’s movies, or the way the mayor sometimes lapsed into dialogue from the silver screen.
The mayor’s ball-bearing gaze bore down on his chief of police, but he knew if there was one man in town — or anywhere else — he couldn’t stare down, it was Ron Ketchum.
“Let me know when you have something,” Clay told Ron.
“Yes, sir.”
“Nobody’s going to do this in my town and get away with it.”
More movie dialogue, Ron thought. But he agreed with the sentiment completely. Goldstrike was his town, too.
Chapter 4
In January, 1848, a carpenter named James Marshall, originally from New Jersey, was building a millrace for his partner, John Sutter, in California’s Coloma Valley when a gleaming pebble approximately half the size of a pea caught his eye. He stooped to pick it up. It was gold. By the fall of that year, gold was being sought and found in California from Tuolumne in the south to the Trinity River in the north — a distance of four hundred miles.
By 1849, word of the discovery of gold in California had spread across the United States and around the world, and the rush was on. In just that first year of the gold rush, more than ninety thousand people heard the news, imagined themselves wealthy, and abandoned their homes and former lives with scarcely a second thought or a backward glance.
And that was just the Americans. Additional thousands poured in from Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, Europe and even Australia.
Most of the gold seekers were the young, adventurous and desperate; an estimated 98% of them were male. A cottage industry of publishing guidebooks on how a traveler might find his way west sprang up. One such publication indicated an overland route from New Orleans to the Sierra that could be traversed in only thirty-six days — when the actual travel time was two hundred and sixteen days. Another suggested a southern route through Mexico that crossed “thickly settled country.” Instead, it passed through a killing desert and the territory of hostile Apaches. Of the almost ninety thousand who headed west in 1849, only forty thousand made it to the gold fields. Of those who did make it, 99% didn’t find enough gold to cover their expenses. All the best claims had been staked in 1848.
Still, the gold rush, far more than earlier agrarian migrations, was largely responsible for the development of the American West. It was the primary reason for the founding of the city of Denver. It was responsible for the direct admission of California to the Union in 1850, having been ceded to the United States by Mexico in 1848, just after the Sutter’s Mill find, but before the word got out. Congress didn’t bother with the usual requirement of California becoming a recognized territory first.
Besides finding gold, the other impetus to head west was the opportunity to “mine the miners.” At a time when the prevailing wage for a laborer was a dollar a day, jobs digging gold on someone else’s claim were being offered at a pay scale of ten to fifteen dollars per day. Simple labor had become a way to strike it at least moderately rich.
A not dissimilar thought occurred to a
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