The Death of a Gold Town

By Charles E. Miller

Editor Fitzroy of the small-town newspaper Mine and Mill is dismayed to see the vitality and pioneer strength of his small town fade before the forces of violence, inexplicable deaths, corruption by bribery and acts of vengeance amongst the ordinary citizens of Fiddletown. he decides to log, to chart, as it were, in his paper and his diary the dismal decay of the early California gold town. He sometimes uses his poetic pen to capture the sad events, the inexplicable failures of ordinary people to show civility and compassion. "Gold! fear was not of tomorrow but of an irrecoverable sacrifice of home, honor and charity in the name of gold-a sacrifice and corruption of the conscience like mephisto the gold miners had traded their souls for the golden metal. That fear lingered beneath outward forms of pleasure and happiness, like a waiting spirit of death."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 22, 2008
• ISBN: 9781477173077

Charles E. Miller

Charles E. Miller graduated from Stanford University with a degree in English, studying at the late Wallace Stegner’s Creative Writing Center. He believes that literature is the most comprehensive, profound, and mysterious voice of people living their lives. Great creative literature presents multifaceted human problems, failures, and victories.

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the death of a gold town

AN EDITOR’S RECOVERY

OF PAST VILLAGE LIFE

Charles E. Miller

Copyright © 2008 by Charles E. Miller.

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At The Diggins

1   Gold Ore

2   An Editor’s Diagnostic Journal

3   An Editor’s Moribund Observtions

4   Loneliness, Booze And Risk Warned Of Death

5   Sounds Of Darkening Despair In Granite—A Gathering Lostness

6   Oh, The Madness Of Life And War!

7   A Dying Gold Town’s Last Days

8   The Suicide Of A Small Town

9   Fire On Night Mountain

10   The Piety Of Small Town History

11   Ghosts From The Mists

12   Violence And Flakes Of Gold

13   Outlawry Corrupts Our Security

14   Final Gasp Of Life—Counterfeit

15   Dispossession Of The Land

16   Shadows Of A Town’s Death

THEME—GOLD! FEAR WAS NOT OF TOMORROW BUT OF AN IRRECOVERABLE SACRIFICE OF HOME, HONOR AND CHARITY IN THE NAME OF GOLD—A SACRIFICE AND CORRUPTION OF THE CONSCIENCE. LIKE MEPHISTO, THE GOLD MINERS HAD TRADED THEIR SOULS FOR THE GOLDEN METAL. THAT FEAR LINGERED BENEATH OUTWARD FORMS OF PLEASURE AND HAPPINESS, LIKE A WAITING SPIRIT OF DEATH.

GOLD ORE

For almost thirty years I sat behind a battered rolltop desk, a carbon pencil in my hand and wrote for and edited Mine and Mill, a newspaper of four cramped pages in a town of about fifteen hundred sweating, fighting, goldseeking townspeople. Most of the populace were men. Women here and there did the laundry, helped groom the rooms in the Pinecone Hotel and, in general, performed the services that men were loathe to do. They could hardly be said to have had any moral influence in Fiddletown, the name of our geographical handup. Their most visible presence was in the service of drinks and charming comfort they offered to patrons of the Gold Nugget saloon.

Two principal occupations engaged the able-bodied men in Fiddletown: mining and drinking. A few boys roamed about, somehow imbibing enough of character conduct to stay out of trouble and, alongside the paucity of girls, form up a class in the one-room schoolhouse. Why children should have lived here at all as inhabitants of Fiddletown never ceased to puzzle me. Conditions in this early—West gold town were primitive, the nature of men’s relations to one another barbaric, studded with violence and bloodshed. And their entire future impinged upon the location of gold and its successful extraction from a recalcitrant rocky and indiscriminate mother lode.

But other than the normal lust for gold and its precipitate of violence and ill-will there was another influence, a shadow, like that of a cloud upon a mountain, that marked this town for depopulation and eventual death. As a native to the region I had an interest in this phenomenon, or, to state the matter more explicitly—the death of a gold town brought upon itself by the villagers’ lack of any remorse for their malice and ill-will and their unperturbable hatred for what I used to call a good conscience. Without a conscience a people is without a soul. Forgiveness was alien to them.

It was as if the villagers did not want to seem too moral and censorious. I point out that murder in Fiddletown was almost an everyday occurrence. Where were personal honor and respect for human life to prohibit and strangle in the cradle such bloody offerings, the blatant demonic denegration of humanity in the village? The decision to draw a gun, to strike with a knife, to bludgeon or trap or maim another person, friend or neighbor or foe, often began in a cabin in a canyon between two hills and two miners—or among the greenchain gang at the sawmill. And it burst out in the saloon when the participants were drunk enough to lose their inhibitions. Conscience between combatants was already moot in such matters. I came to discover that the principal cause for acts of violence in Fiddletown was creating an atmosphere of fear. The regularity of homicidal debauch was pushing human compassion out through the cracks in conscience—or what was left of it—and an icy fear was taking over residency in the lives of the townfolks.

Then again, I was not certain of my premise. And being a man who is curious by nature, I sought further for an answer to provincial fear. Surely they could not all be cowards at heart. Firearms abounded in Fiddletown. Almost every dwelling and edifice with a roof on it harbored a revolver or a long rifle or a German weapon of some design used in the war with Mexico. Yet I saw fear in people’s eyes, in their refusal to use lantern light at night, preferring the darkness. I thought I saw fear in the empty streets at night and in the hail of another townsman that was quenched before it ever left the lips of either. Could it be, I wondered, that the people feared not the invisible future and the lust for gold, which they all shared but that they were fearful because of their very freedom?

Fiddletown lay anchored to the slopes and rocky ledges and outcroppings of the High Sierras. It was a town without a court or any visible law enforcement except the sidearms most men carried. The singular official to represent harmony and peace was a mean-spirited and at times vicious sheriff who dangled a pistol on each fat hip. Yet they feared no lawfully-appointed authority. What then?

I was reflecting upon these things one night just at dusk, as I rode my mule Gypsy along the Wolf Creek toward the upper railroad bridge. I was examining the structure of the heavy timbers, where they took into account the force of the creek water, the slope of the embankment on either side and the sheer magnificence of human labor toiling with nature and her challenges, when it occurred to me that the townspeople did not fear violence so much as they feared a more subtle consideration. They feared that they ought to be held accountable to someone or to something, and they did not know where to start. The engineers who built that trestle had to account for the force of gravity and the weight of the logging trains, the force of the moving creek water, the inertia of the red loam embankment pinned by timbers, and the decadence of time. Why ought people to be any different? A few folks in Fiddletown doubtless believed in God but what of that? Most of the others believed in the validity of their own lives. The visionaries among them confided in the gray granite cliffs above and the ferns and rushes along the Wolf Creek. That was their reality. It did not dispel or fill the fearsome emptiness of aloneness. In other words, I realized as I sat there in the mountain dusk, listening to the wild rush of the cascading creek, that the people of Fiddletown felt no bonds between themselves. This being so, they could not even be accountable to each other. It was with this thought that I began to share some of their fear.

One church had raised its steeple in Fiddletown. At first—that is about 1850—it was used as a social hall and meeting place, whenever enough of the shame-facedly pious and stout-hearted citizens felt that they had a just cause to settle matters—the marking of mining claims, the tethering of mules and other sech things in the way of timber wagons and ore carts, the use of dynamite too close to the structures in town or the cabins outlying and, most important, drunken brawls in and around the Pinecone Hotel and The Gold Nugget saloon, even sometimes in proximity to the assayer’s office in vengeance for poor assaying. As for the believers they called their edifice the Last Installment Church, and seemed hypnotized by the Book of Revelations. The name stuck, as did the building, until an aggrieved until a disgruntled churchgoer burned it down. Arson was never proved. A clapboard building with a locomotive bell in its belfry, the church was of more importance as a symbol of an uneasy harmony in Fiddletown than as a sanctuary with the power to inspire forgiveness or to dispel the fog of fear I allude to.

I felt their fear though I did not accept it, inasmuch as I had traveled to Fiddletown from Sacramento by the Sierra Stage and my mind did not dwell on the same thoughts as its inhabitants—excepting, that is, when I tracked the scent of a good news story. Perhaps the more common symptom of their fear of liberty was their cultivation of gossip, since its intimacies had the capacity to furnish the men and the few women of Fiddletown with a sense of their shared tough times and hardiness and their participation in the life of the town through gossip.

The folks in Fiddletown appeared to look and act like the condemned, as though their contentment had been snuffed out by an angry God. Yet it was that very freedom that ought to have engendered in their simple souls a yearning to celebrate all the seasons, a good timber harvest every year and the absence of any deaths in the Claymore Mine. On Sunday mornings the air was heavy with the smell of some kind of foreboding, sinister yet real, as though evil had jumped every claim in life and happiness lay like a garment of death upon every bright image along the dirt roads and streets. There lived not many children in Fiddletown and yet hardly were these few ever to be seen on the main ways that led to the Claymore Mine and the sawmill. Except for the saloon habituees, the loud music and shouts that emanated from behind the swinging doors of the The Gold Nugget, an aspect of abandonment lay across the store fronts, as few of them as there ever were—the assay office, the dry goods store, a general store, Sheriff Dunham’s hangout, a wagon works and smithy, and the Pinecone Hotel. Not much more than this comprised the early town as I knew it. There lay over Fiddletown a kind of death pall of expediency—I don’t believe that this gold town was much different from hundreds of others that sprang into existence like the flowering of wild weeds in the Western fields during those years. Absent from its character as a ramshackle town with corrugated tin roofs was a sense of renewal, of refreshing joy in the morrow.

People seldom smiled. I came to believe that the residents and workers, the miners and mill hands, suffered from some kind of plague of penitential grief. As the editor of the newspaper I could not help perceiving from my vantage point the lack of all zeal, ambition and community spirit, except for the lust after gold and what it would buy in whiskey, bordello pleasures and the satisfactions of revenge and accumulation. From out of this empty cavern of meaninglessness had come the enigmatic quality of fear, lit by a few candles of hope here and there, that most of the older citizens shared alike. The fear was nagging, persistent and real, similar to that known by townsfolk who anticipate the approach of a cyclone. Why, for example, would a miner come up to me one day on the street and lament, Mister Fitzroy, I don’t see how we can keep on diggin’ in thet there mine without accountin’ fer the gold got out!

But don’t you keep records over at the Claymore?

Shift bosses keep track o’ the tonnage. But we got no figers ’bout o’ how much gold we dug out.

Well, but you get paid, don’t you? Course you do—and pretty good wages, too.

That we do, sir. But what happens when the gold runs out? Then where do we go? Sure, we’re free to pull up stakes. You’re settled down here, Mister Fitzroy… .

I began to understand from much about the town from that street conversation. Without having to ask, I was certain that I could find a mill hand who would express the same fear—What happens, sir, when the timber gives out and the logs stop coming in? The mill hands could always leave. They, too, like the miners, possessed that freedom to go. Their gloom came from the fear that their liberation would mean their ultimate end and the finality of their free lives as mountain folks in Fiddletown.

As I dug through certain historical documents—for they had become so by virtue of their yellowed age and accounting for the past—they were mostly news stories from the morgue, random letters and my own literary sketch pad, I discovered that the towns folk habitually lynched horse thieves, claim-jumpers, highwaymen and those known to be cruel to women and animals. Having performed a singular duty of God according to His justice, they were scarcely reluctant to tolerate Sunday morning church in The Gold Nugget saloon. I discovered, too, that the town had lynched a man for the fraud of salting a gold mine, this during the early days of the gold strike. Letters and especially some early articles in Mine and Mill informed me that although talk was cheap, events at times came the hard way by sweat, pain and bloodshed. I’m going to tell about certain of those events, but I will have to dig down into the newspaper morgue to find them. The old timers could give me their intimate accounts but, of course, they are either buried in Pioneer Cemetery or, having departed on other journeys, they lie under foreign granite and rain-blackened bronze. Such things remind me of my years.

The townspeople’s fear of freedom dwelt upon a sinister aspect to it that I discovered in my investigations—and that was despair. Despair in a folk who appeared so involved in living puzzled me further. This attitude had become enmeshed with the thought that for some mysterious and incomprehensible reason they felt that they were damned, as a consequence of which surmise every step they took, every raised pick and working of the shovel, every sawn board and driven nail took them closer to the edge of the abyss. Was this pervasive fear the result of a feeling of guilt, perhaps inspired by a sermon from Pastor Lockwood, or from their hidden avarice?

Cruel fate had destined them for a preternatural if not a real death. Had Fiddletown been a Calvinist New England village given over to the devil by God I could have understood. Here, however, buried in the deep-running creeks and rivers of the High Sierras where the pristine landscape of winter snows amid the crags and the silent sweet darkness of the fertile woods mocked the any shadow of evil and any human hint of God’s judgement, I had difficulty understanding the outlook of the tradesmen and laborers in Fiddletown, especially the stream-panning miners. It was they, as numerous along the fringes of the creeks as frogs in the spring, who ought to have shown the most optimism. Yet to my eyes that did not appear to be the case.

Had the residents committed some wicked and horrifying act that had quenched hope and sickened the soul and had blighted any yearning for adventure? If so, what had occurred? Had they lynched men for no good reason, dealing out murder to protect their community conscience? Had they blasphemed God by their wicked ways, like the Canaanites challenging the hosts of David and protesting that their glory matched God’s at the Gold Nugget? By common consensus—a brief boycott—fair-minded citizens had protested that no poker or faro games be played on Sunday before high noon. In a town of fifteen hundred knuckle-hard miners and mill hands bent upon expanding their wealth anyway, that was a challenge to disaster. Then again, had some powerful personage, unbeknownst to them, come into their town to dwell among the heathen and, in so doing, he had produced this innervating despair that verged on the repudiation of all hope for the future of Fiddletown and of their own fortunes?

I cannot say that I loved these folks in that place, but they possessed a ground-level integrity that was too American to miss. I suspect that a trifle of the keening spirit taunted their religion of gold and had espied out the gambler-debtor, the hardpan miners and the chance-taking mill hands, and all others who in time had bequeathed this bleak aspect to the town. Their struggles ordinarily should have given them greater resourcefulness and inner power, but the opposite counterbalance of despair and its attendant fear, as repudiations of personal freedom, puzzled me and stirred my soul, not to say, piqued my interest and my curiosity as a reporter. The Mine and Mill had begun publication a little over three years before I arrived. I cannot help but think that my paper—as I came to own it after Mister Hoagland’s death—quickened the spirit of townspeople generally and its readership in particular.

Fiddletown is now gone, blown away, weathered to crumbling splinters and scattered into the lower desert by high winds that sweep down from the crevasses, the cirques and scree chutes of grandeur amid the snow blown crags. I came across it almost completely buried under dirt, the cake of rust and the snows of last winter when I explored the old mill site on my long skis. It was a horseshoe hammered out of a flat bar of iron by the smithy for someone, a miner doubtless. Again, the fever of enquiry, the hot blood of thirst to know the reasons for Fiddletown’s malaise stirred within me. Yet I knew that I held the bight end of the rope that would lead me to the answers to the mystery.

The newspaper morgue, as I have said, provided old stories of conquest, pain and catastrophic defeat, of love and its sardonic triumph in wretchedness and depravity where men’s lives, amidst the glut of plenty, often like old moss, partake of the slimed coldness of their granite source. Into Fiddletown poured the fortune-seekers, the Argonauts. Why they left is the real story. They went away without the contentment of having found gold or, having found it, spent it among the jades and the rattle of dice and the clatter of the roulette wheel. Some of the events and characters I remember clearly as if it were yesterday, idling at their cabins and tents, panning on Wolf Creek, at the mill site, down in town… or wherever. I had lived among these folks. I had watched them and mingled with them, munched hard biscuits and talked long hours over a cuts of cheese sliced off a cheese wheel with a skinning knife. We had exchanged mountain news, vital only to them as mountain folk, across the foaming heads of mugs of beer. I had shared their dirty jokes and I had felt their leather calluses when I shook hands with them, many of them.

As a former editor and reporter I now had chosen to go back and remember the inhabitants, the hardship times and the events that had transpired in Fiddletown, and to let my search answer my questions. By trenching up the past I also realized with no small excitement that I would renew meaning in my own life, which had slipped away since the death of my wife.

I would proceed with my search pragmatically, for the lives of folks in Fiddletown were usually lost in the pragmatic details of the events I had edited and often narrated. I had shared their lives. I found poetry also that I had somehow surreptitiously written concerning certain citizens and will, sparing the reader’s sensibilities, include some of it with my larger account. Here, then, is their story. Follow me if you will as I query history to solve the enigma of what I saw as the wrongful death of a small mountain town by the ennui of fear from which there followed a fatal, calamitous despair. For, after all, the disappearance of any town of promise and vitality, whether by negligence or the forces of nature, is in itself a calamity.

Towns like Fiddletown will always be with us. We make too much of big cities; folks there often think that they own a corner on brains, imagination, initiative and grit. That all depends on the merchandise you’re looking at. In Fiddletown there was plenty to see and do that required all of these human qualities.

I was able while in the morgue of Mine and Mill to disinter numerous old stories I had reported and some lines that another on my staff had composed. I actually found a cold, dilapidated, rat-infested and animal inhabited room in the old Pine—cone Hotel while I undertook my research. It had almost burned down. At times, I observed, the character who was featured in my story was too stoned for an interview—but I did my best. The clippings were yellowed with the heat and years an were quite brittle. I lost a few in the handling when they crumbled in my fingers. I confess to the poetic lines; at the time I thought verse was a feasible and perfectly gentlemanly way to get at the heart of a person or a situation. It had the power at times to turn the edge of my personal detestation and disgust, to say nothing of my dread and astonishment before the threatening and unfamiliar. I was all too aware of the wilderness in the hearts of some men that posed a danger, physically, to my survival and well-being. I remembered, always, that it was the people of Fiddletown who made the news. I knew a great many of them by their first names. In thirty years as a newspaper editor, acquaintances are legion, friends are here and there while one’s enemies remain hidden if they have no reason to attack. Always, I tried to present as small a target as possible. However hard-bitten and unsettling their community was at times, I tried to remember that they were all people who were capable of submitting to the bondage of fear and despair. But why… ?

Theodore Fitzroy, editor

AN EDITOR’S DIAGNOSTIC

JOURNAL

I set out upon my journey of enquiry like a journalistic vagabond. What human—or natural—forces or events had caused Fiddletown to die? A chill wind blew down the empty main street, rolling a bobbing tangle of tumbleweed along with the sweeping sand, and onto a board sidewalk where it snagged on a splinter of the planking. Gusts swept fine dust from the dried ruts of loamy clay. Small scarfs of sand continued to wrap around the legs of a tilted horse trough. Sand and wind rattled the hanging shop sign over the hardware store on which many winters of rain and snow had exposed the black rusting tin beneath. I saw Jade and Ted, old cronies, enter to purchase some black powder for their mining claim. A distracting gust of wind erased their images.

The brilliant blue Sierra sky shone between the broken clapboards in the store facade. The twin swinging doors, many of their slats missing, swung back and forth at the entrance to The Gold Nugget saloon. I could hear loud voices, laughter and the clink of glass. The doors moved as though by hidden hands. A ball of tumbleweed hit my legs driven by a powerful down gust of wind from the heights above the town. Except for the slapping of a loose board somewhere and the hiss and persistent howl of the wind around sharp corners, all else was silence.

Broken glass on the ground beneath upper French windows attested to the force of the cirque’s gale winds and the vandalism caused by overnight sojourners, occasionally a fugitive from the law, among the remains of an early strike-it-rich gold town. As the editor of Mine and Mill, the scene before my eyes was a familiar one. I remounted my mule. I had regarded many times during my workday life, the false front to the dry goods store, which this day, as I sat astride my mule, assumed the warped and sagging aspect of a tired old sourdough burro. The corroded miner’s pan and pick were still nailed in place. But the facade paint had long ago peeled and fallen away into history under the cold winters and the hot sun of these mountain heights. J.T Tillotson Hardware was hardly discernable on the facade. Howdy there, Fitzroy! I could hear Tillotson’s voice as he stepped out onto the board