Fool's Gold Read Free Page B

mouth of the Columbia, even making a rash crossing of the Sierra Nevada in the middle of the winter and nearly losing some important scientists en route.
    When they did have the chance of leave in Yerba Buena, they took it enthusiastically and the young girl, playing hostess during her mother’s illness, was for all of them a fond reminder of the homes they had left behind. As she grew up, she had no difficulty coaxing her father’s colleagues to initiate her into the mysteries of geology, cartography, or daguerrotyping, for which exacting science she soon showed a remarkable aptitude. On a few memorable occasions, they even took her up into the mountains with them, to make maps and take photographic plates. She rode the mountains, swam in the icy streams and gloried in the freedom of the empty valleys and the splendour of nature unsullied by any human presence but their own.
    Then they would be off, gone as swiftly as they had come, leaving her to the stifling, enclosed atmosphere of the unhappy house. In the empty days that followed their departure, she would sit at the open window, oblivious to the sea fogs blowing in from the bay and drifting up the valley, oblivious to the boom of Borica’s shore batteries sending the flocks of startled pelicans to wheel in a screaming mass over Alcatraz Island, and dream of the day when she would be old enough to travel up into the mountains with her father and his companions, surveying, mapping, photographing new scenes, strange Indians, mountains that no white man had ever seen, until her mother sent the servant to bid her come and read to her from some improving volume or play for an hour on the inlaid piano which had come round the Horn with them.
    Apart from her father’s all too infrequent visits, little else happened in the small settlement as Alicia Owens was growing up. In ‘42, the Russians withdrew from Fort Ross and returned to Alaska; they sold their stock to Sutter, a Swiss immigrant, for his new ranch up on the Sacramento which he called New Helvetia, though travellers called it Sutter’s Fort. More immigrants arrived, many of them in wagon trains over routes mapped out by her father. In ‘46, the Brooklyn deposited over two hundred Mormons on the shore, which vastly increased the numbers in the small settlement, as well as the racial and religious variety! The Mexicans began selling off to the newcomers the land which the Spanish had originally assigned to the Missions; private ranches began to spring up from the coast to the Pacific Ranges, north and south of the great bay. By her fifteenth year, relations between the new, mainly Anglo-American immigrants and the Mexican government had deteriorated and the Alcalde , prophesying war, left for Monterey, taking his daughters with him.
    *
    ‘Washington or Sacramento?’ asked the minister curtly, his voice bringing her back to the present with a jolt.
    ‘I — I beg your pardon?’ She tightened her arm around the child, sleeping peacefully between them, her face buried in the woman’s lap.
    ‘Will I put you down in Washington or Sacramento?’ He gestured to the river ferry tied up at the levée, embarking a flood of passengers, on foot and on horseback, from the teeming river front.
    She looked around her at the garish saloons and the raucous passers-by.
    ‘Sacramento, if you will be so kind,’ she said firmly.
    ‘Stay in the gig then, or they’ll charge you extra for the crossing,’ he said, negotiating the horse and cart through the lounging crowds and across the rumbling gangway onto the ferry.
    ‘I can pay for my own passage,’ she replied sharply. She drew out the purse and tried to pass one of the gold coins over to the minister.
    He turned to her in exasperation. ‘Let me give you some advice, ma’am which I hope you’ll take for the sake of my calling, if for naught else: if you’re too good for Washington, then you’ll need every last red cent of that money to find a lodging in Sacramento