Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea Read Online Free Page A

journalist described her, was “young, petite in form, and in personal appearance very attractive; added to this, she is possessed of a lively vivacity which renders her very interesting in conversation.” As she walked the gangway to the Sonora ’s deck, Virginia carried a small cage housing a yellow canary.
    Another Birch in the crowd, no relation to Billy, was James Birch, a thick-chested man who had been a stagecoach driver in Providence, Rhode Island, and had trekked to California overland in 1849. Within five years, he had become president of the California Stage Company, then resigned to establish a stage line between Texas and California,which would complete the first transcontinental stagecoach route. The previous year, Birch’s wife had given birth to a son, and to honor the birth, a friend in San Francisco had given Birch a sterling silver cup. With his family residing in Massachusetts, Birch carried the cup with him now to present to his infant son.
    Among the clusters of men along the quay stood one man with thin hair carefully parted and slicked down, a large nose, and wide mutton-chops in a cotton candy cloud out two inches from his jowls: Judge Alonzo Castle Monson. A native of New York, Monson had graduated from Yale in 1840 and from Columbia Law School in 1844. Five years later he had migrated to California, one of the original forty-niners, and within three years took the bench in the geographic heart of the gold rush, Sacramento County. The San Francisco Alta claimed, “No more capable or efficient judge ever sat upon the bench in California.” However, Judge Monson soared to legendary status in the gold country not for his intellect, but for losing his house in a poker game. As one newspaper discreetly put it, the judge “sported” to the limit.
    The first-class passengers boarded at their leisure. Their three-hundred-dollar fare entitled them to a private cabin aft, where the ship rode smoother, a porthole looked out across the ocean, and the inner door opened onto the main deck dining saloon. Each private cabin contained three cushioned berths, one above the other, a locker, a mirror, toilet, washbowl, and water bottles and glasses. Carpet covered the floors, and layered damask and cambric curtains screened the berths.
    Around the ticket office, nearly four hundred steerage passengers now clamored for the best berths forward in the hold. The hold was cramped and hot, the air damp, and the berths stacked three high, often no more than two feet side to side separating the tiers. A higher berth near a porthole to let in sunlight and fresh air made the trip in steerage tolerable.
    One steerage passenger among the throng was Oliver Perry Manlove, a spirited young man who with three other men, a wagon, and four yoke of cattle, had set out from Wisconsin and crossed the prairie on foot in 1854. Manlove recorded every mile of the journey, a five-month search for grass and water to keep the animals alive, and for wood and game to keep the men warm and fed. In a train with three other wagons, they oftenwalked twenty-five miles a day. Sometimes they passed wagon trains as long as six miles, three hundred wagons, their white canvas stained yellow with beeswax, a thousand head of cattle trailing behind. “This was life in earnest,” wrote Manlove. “All rushing on to the Eldorado.”
    Manlove counted the miles, the Indians, the crosses marking the graves of those who had died along the trail: This one hit by lightning, that one drowned, the other one stricken by disease, another shot. During the five months, he counted 205 crosses.
    In September, two days short of his twenty-third birthday, Manlove had arrived at Nelson Creek, which emptied into the middle fork of the Feather River, which joined the main Feather north of Marysville at one of the richest strikes of the gold rush, Bidwell’s Bar. In a ravine only a few ridges south of Nelson Creek,