“Pride is a powerful force.

The pride that kept so many men in California. They want to go home. But I can’t go until I’ve got something to prove my success. They’ve been reading about success back home.

I know, says the miner, how many people are failing. Failure is the most common fact of life in California. They don’t know that.

How can I go home a failure, when they expect me to come home a success?

So they stay.”

-J.S. Holliday

That night, a terrible dream visits you as you sleep by the fire.  In your dream, your father is near death.  Alone in his bed, blinded by fever, he calls out to you; you seem to be floating above him, but you cannot speak.

You wake with a start, drenched in sweat.  The fire has gone out, and Borthwick has disappeared.  You pack up and start the day-long hike to Soldier’s Gulch.

1856

After another night in a mining camp, you rise at dawn and head to the hills.

Soldier’s Gulch is a huge circular valley ringed with steep rock cliffs, and everyone seems to think it’s the belly of an extinct volcano.

It looks made for gold mining.

For fourteen hours, you hammer away at the mountainside.  Around nightfall, you hit a quartz seam, which you take as a great omen.  You mine deep into the night, extracting a few small nuggets by lamplight.

So afraid of losing your claim, you sleep on the hard ground, clutching your pickaxe.

You do the same thing the next day.  And the next.  And the next after that.

For a week, you keep moving slowly down the quartz deposit, left to right, as your excitement dims.

On the eighth day, you awaken to a scream of jubilation.  Twenty yards away, a miner you’ve watched for a week has hit a vein of gold.  He’s worked just as hard as you, for just as long.

Now he’s rich.

And you’re still swinging the axe.

That night, you hear an argument that turns into a fistfight over a gold claim.  It’s not labor that leads to riches, you realize — it’s just luck.

You take a job with a mining company at the Volcano diggings, save up enough for passage, and sail home in late 1852.

Back in Kinderhook, everyone comments on how much older you look.  Every time you read about gold in California, you feel that much wiser.

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