The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana) (71 page)

“There’s land,” said Matt Kissel. “Green rolling land, with thick black dirt underneath, along the Bear River. I’ve bore it in mind this last year.”

Nobody questioned him. Any time he made a statement of that length, it amounted to pronouncing the benediction.

So, I’ll move along—these adventures have taken up too much space already—and say that, by depending on Mr. Peters’ shrewd, calculating eye, we sold out the butchery and the mules and found our way, early in November, into a well-watered valley lying north of the Bear River bottoms; a succession of richly green and fertile fields, with woodlands, that rolled up from the bottoms to the foothills of the mountains above. Meadows with good pastures, and groves of black oak with mistletoe clumped in their branches, creek beds full of yellow willows, and digger pines, black and twin-trunked, in the high reaches. Flowering trees and shrubs such as we hadn’t seen since the prairies: dogwood and climbing grape, berries, wild peas and manzanitas—“little apples”—and nuts very sweet to the taste.

My father wrote in his Journals: “There is room here for the great cattle ranches that we mean to create out of this overflowing wilderness. This valley of ours comes close, I believe, to a Paradise on earth.”

The arrangements had all been made. We’d scouted it thoroughly, and not bought it on the spur of the moment, as my father urged of each new piece inspected. This land itself cost next to nothing; in fact, you might have grabbed it by squatting, but Mr. Peters insisted on “unclouding” some Spanish land-grant titles and some claims made by Indians, too. It was free and clear, over seven thousand acres, ownership divided equally between those of us together on the trip, divided in three, that is, with a section and home for Todd and Uncle Ned, with advantages to get them started and assistance to buy more if they chose.

Our houses were on their way up before Christmas. We had fenced pastures, but had left most unwooded acres as open range. Then we’d bought cattle from people like Captain Sutter, Mr. Johnson,
of Johnson Ranch down the Bear River, Mr. Yount and Mr. Chiles, in Napa Valley, and General Vallejo and his brother, Colonel Salvador Vallejo, both fine, generous men, at Sonoma.

Matt Kissel, still determined to farm crops, along with raising cattle, had laid in wheat, corn and barley, and now waited impatiently for the spring.

Altogether we had hired about a dozen Indians to help out with the work, and now we made things move. I never before saw my father so hard put. But something remained missing; he wanted the family out. He’d written letters saying he was coming home to fetch them, and now he could hardly wait. So, after a very merry Christmas spent in the Kissels’ half-finished house, of timber and adobe brick, we bade him farewell. I was to stay behind, living with Buck and Jennie, to keep the work going on our place.

We gathered early one morning in the Kissels’ front yard, with those smoky-blue mountains in the background, and hallooed him off. Mr. Peters was there, too, on one of his trips out to supervise the buying.

Giving me an embrace, my father shook hands with Mr. Kissel and Coulter and Uncle Ned and Todd, and kissed the women on the cheek.

“Six months, eight at the most,” he cried, swinging up into the saddle. “We’ll be reunited and wander no more.” Then he called to Jennie, “Take care of the future Governor of California,” which was his way of mentioning the baby they were going to have that summer.

I will remember him as he looked that morning. He was healthy; the gray hair now seemed more dignified than old, and his face, tanned and taut, had the appearance of a man who has finally come close to finding what he wants. He held his hat in his hand, and his eyes shone with the fun of starting out on a new venture. The Santa Fe Trail. Who could tell, there might be a fortune in it. Opportunity, opportunity …

Standing there watching him, I was glad he had never grown up.
Probably I should have been sad, because I had an uneasy feeling that we would never see him again. But I couldn’t help smiling instead. It was all right. The pot of gold, the real strike, his dream run to earth, lay somewhere up ahead, around the next bend of the trail. It was all right. That next bend was my father’s pot of gold, just as I’d said in my letter. I wondered how long he could have lasted before those beckoning hills stirred the old restlessness. How many months before the ranch itself was his enemy, and, the first crack had appeared that told of trouble coming? We waved goodbye, and I watched him ride away to keep his appointment with Fortune.

Spring had arrived—the willows were budding along the creek beds and snow was melting in the high ranges—when a solitary rider covered with dust walked his horse up to the Coulters’ doorstep late one evening. Hearing him, we stepped out, and he said, “Can you direct me to James, or Jaimie, McPheeters?”

Somehow, without asking, I knew he brought news of my father. When I spoke up, he dismounted and handed over an envelope.

I took it indoors, to lantern light, and examined the contents, which were twofold: a short note of condolence from Mr. Peters and a dispatch, containing a report, from the Bishop of Zacatecas, in Mexico. It appeared that, without notifying us first and perhaps causing needless alarm, Mr. Peters had started inquiries after receiving by mail a number of papers (in which his name and address were mentioned) that my father carried when he left. The dispatch from the Bishop of Zacatecas read as follows:

Mr. Junius T. Peters
Miners, and Seamen’s Bank Trust Co.
San Francisco, California

Sir:

I received your letter of March 15, but have delayed my reply as I was waiting for information I had requested from the Rector of the Colotlán. His report has now reached me and reads as follows:

“Rectory of Colotlán
,
April 19, 1852

“Most Excellent Sir:
Desiring to satisfy the wishes of Your Holiness about the assassination of Dr. McPheeters, I have the honor to make the following statement: Dr. McPheeters was wounded on Tuesday, February 3, in an abandoned house on the outskirts of this city where he had been taken on the pretext of calling on a patient, by a man disguised as a woman, who came between 9 and 10 at night to Mr. James Dwyer’s house, in which Dr. McPheeters was living.

“The Doctor accompanied the disguised man to the house of the supposed patient, and having gone as far as the patio, was surrounded by three men, one of whom stabbed him in the chest with a dagger and struck his head with a stick, inflicting seven serious head wounds. The police found the dying man there, being guided by his moans. He was carried to his residence, which was the same as Mr, James Dwyer’s (an American quack), and lingered there in bed till the fifth, then was buried the same day in the cemetery which lies south of this city.

“According to the records of the trial, which I have before me in giving this information to Your Holiness, the assassins did not have the time to rob him, as he lost only his hat, cane and a ring of slight worth. It seems, then, and appears from the records, that the assassins were paid by the quack Dwyer to put him to death so as to get possession of some funds of the deceased, for from the statement of Maria Sostenes Banuelos, who attended him, it appears that he always wore a sort of vest which she herself made for him, holding a few ounces of gold, and that in addition to this quantity, the deceased had in a leather belt five small money bags which would hold about $20 or more each. This money disappeared, though the police were active in trying to clear up the crime. The records bring to light facts that lead one to regard Dwyer as the instigator of the crime, with Petronilo Raigosa and Antonio Gonzalez as the executors of the homicide.

“The trial is still undecided. The record consists of 117 large sheets, yet in spite of the fact that in it the defendants are declared under arrest, they are nevertheless at liberty, and Mr. Dwyer free
on bail, which he broke and lives undisturbed at the Chachihuitee mine, where he has gone so far in his disservice and wickedness as to present a claim to Washington against Mexico for damages and injuries for the time he was held in this city on account of his horrible crime. May God our Lord guard Your Holiness for many years.

(
signed
) P
ABLO
S
ANCHEZ
C
ASTELLANOS”

I believe the foregoing will satisfy your wishes, at least so far as I am able to do so.

Placing myself at your service, I am

Faithfully yours
, J. M.
DEL
R
EFUGIO
Bishop of Zacatecas

The rest of my father’s Journals were sent along later. The last word of the last entry he made, obviously in haste, was, “Tomorrow,” with three dots: “… ”

The Reverend Ebersohl arrived a week after the letter. Seeing his duty to be removed for a while from San Francisco, devil or no devil, he had worked his way upriver by manual toil, and walked or ridden wagon trains as far as the ranch. It would be hard to say just how glad we were to see him. Sitting on the Kissels’ porch after supper—Coulter and Jennie and Uncle Ned and Todd and the Kissels—Reverend Ebersohl forgot he was a preacher for a while. He even drank a glass of wine; I couldn’t have been more staggered if he’d hung up a notice praising the devil. Then he sat talking about my father until midnight. I’d never heard him make so much sense; he said the old things, but he said them well.

“Doctor placed his trust in the future. That way, it might be said that he had more faith than all of us put together. He believed in the green pastures, the beacon on the hill. And I think he died feeling he had found it. Probably he never realized that, to hold it, to savor fully what was nothing but a poor ghost, he must release it soon, keep moving, hurry on, push forward on a search that, for him, could never end. You mustn’t grieve, son.
He’s safe in his illusory world, rid of his private demons. And we’ve all been enriched by his wonderful faults and foolishness.”

I wrote a letter to my mother, and in due time an answer came back. The house was sold and my father’s debts paid; there was enough left over for her and Hannah and Mary to come to California, by way of Panama, then by steamer to San Francisco. During the winter, Aunt Kitty had died, having failed to cure a case of pneumonia with a broth made of possum liver and sanctified spunk water (and refusing to co-operate with a doctor who was summoned). Clara and Willie had both been freed, given a present of money, and jobs found them in the neighborhood.

My mother was putting Louisville behind her for good. I knew how she hated to leave, but I was glad she was coming. At no place in her letter did she mention my father in any way. I think that for her in these years, left alone as she was, his letters drying up for long periods, he had almost ceased to exist. She had shut him out with such firmness that he no longer had any power to hurt her.

Months would pass before they could arrive. Meanwhile the ranches grew, our crops were planted, we prospered. But the times were not peaceful entirely. People had begun to sense the value of these lands, and ruffians had twice tried to take possession. On one terrible day, Coulter, tired of trying to pit reason against force (very much against his nature to start off with) buckled on his gun, looking like the black-jowled roughneck of the trail, and killed three men in a glade not far from his house, letting each draw first, in accordance with his reputation. After that, when word got out clear up and down the coast exactly who he was, the side-kick of Bridger and Kit Carson, the man they couldn’t run out of Texas, the land-hawks let us alone. One unhappy feature of the incident was that it caused bad blood for a few days between him and Uncle Ned, who claimed that, with odds of three to one, Coulter had a moral obligation to let him in on the entertainment. Coulter promised to reform, and it passed off.

Autumn has come, and I am on my way to San Francisco. I have a new suit. I am going on seventeen years old. I am scarcely aware of the river, or the boats, or, finally, the city where I lived in hardship for so long. There is a little stab of pain when I see the spot where the sailors’ tent stood, and think of my father’s plans in those days. But a ship is coming in toward the wharf; the lines are out; men are running up and down; a skiff picks out a lead line that falls short in the water; and the steam winches make a great noise.

And on deck, strange in her English clothes and smart manner, is my sister who can be a sister no longer. For a second, she folds her arms across her breasts in the Indian sign I had not understood that day in the grove when she left; then she gives a gay smile and waves.

The gangplank is down, and I am up in a rush, my heart thumping in my chest.

“You look—different. Is it really you?”

“Oh, Jaimie, it
is
me!”

She places her hand in mine, and we walk away into that fine bright future that my father always knew existed, our present, in which I shall now believe forever.

The author wishes to acknowledge his indebtedness to Sterling Memorial Library, at Yale University, and in particular to the curator of the Library’s collection of Western Americana., Dr. Archibald Hanna, whose patient guidance and help made possible the research here involved.

Thanks also are extended to the Public Library of Louisville, Kentucky, and to the Medical College of Edinburgh University.

It should be noted that the journals of Dr. Joseph Middleton, upon which much of this material is very loosely based, are occasionally quoted verbatim, and that the letter from the Bishop of Zacatecas, in the final chapter, is substantially the same as one written after the death of Dr. Middleton in Mexico. The early San Francisco street sermons of Reverend William Taylor are twice drawn upon with minor alterations; several paragraphs are similarly used from J. M. Grant’s
The Truth for the Mormons,
published in the middle 1800’S; and two paragraphs followed closely from the collected journals of Edwin Bryant
, What I Saw in California,
published in London in 1849.