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that, thank God. But drink it for pleasure? A substitute for real beer?
    “Mister, don’t make me laugh,” one and all told Michael Walsh.
    The gold seekers pushed on through present day Nebraska. Even though the greatest hardships lay ahead, the long journey was beginning to take its toll on the Walsh children, the oldest of whom, Wilhelmine, was only six. Rory and Erik were four and three, respectively.
    Adeline did not want to see her children die of exhaustion or depletion of their spirits, not after she’d kept them safe from the cholera. At every trading post along the way, she asked her husband if they might not establish their home there, if he might not make a success of his business there. After all, so many others had set up their businesses and were prospering from selling to the flood of immigrants.
    But Michael Walsh was determined to make it to California. He said that’s where the greatest concentration of riches lay, and that’s where they would go. Unspoken, even to his wife, was his fear that if he didn’t find a large gathering of fellow Irishmen with gold in their pockets, he’d never be able to sell the stout he wanted to brew.
    So, they pushed on through the treacherous mountain passes of the Rockies and the great, deadly deserts of the West. In Nevada, the sun was so fierce they had to travel at night by torchlight. One morning as the migrant party stopped to rest in the shade of an outcropping of rock, Michael Walsh found his three children with his wife’s fingers in their mouths. Their parched little mouths were red. They were suckling on Adeline’s blood.
    It was moisture, she said. She’d pricked her fingers and was giving her children their mother’s strength.
    Others in the wagon train sought a less drastic way to slake their thirst and preserve their meager stores of water. They finally came to Michael Walsh for small measures of his stout. But even dying of thirst, they developed no taste for the stuff. This filled Walsh with a dread almost as great as the thought of death.
    Finally, eighteen grueling weeks after leaving Independence, Missouri, the Masked Man Party reached the Sierra Nevada, only to find inclines so steep that their wagons had to be broken down and hauled over jagged ridges. But now, even this backbreaking work could not dampen the enthusiasm of the gold seekers. They knew they were near their destination. Just the other side of these mountains was the green, fertile Sacramento Valley where gold lay waiting to be found. They would dig their fortunes — their dreams — right out of the earth.
    The Walshes never made it that far.
    They were stopped by the epiphany Adeline Walsh experienced when the sparkling majesty of the lake that would later bear her name first filled her eyes. She drew a deep breath, clasped her hands to her heart, and turned to her husband. The words she spoke to him that day were later recorded for posterity.
    “Michael, we have found Eden on high.” Her next words were less poetic but had far more immediate impact. “This is where we will stay.”
    Assuming his wife meant where they would rest, fill their barrels with the crystalline water from the lake, and gather their energies for the final push, Michael did not argue. But by the very next morning he understood clearly that if he were to continue the journey, he would do so alone. On foot.
    Adeline felt certain that it was her destiny to live out her days in this place. Michael argued that it was already September, and that if they didn’t leave soon, they would be snowbound and no doubt die there. Adeline’s response was that she better start felling some trees then, build a cabin and lay in some food.
    Michael Walsh was galled to have come so far and be stopped just short of his goal. But try as he might — and try he did — he couldn’t imagine going on and leaving his wife and children behind. He was sure he’d be consigning them to their deaths, and even if they were to