The Ladies of Sutter's Fort Read online

  The Ladies of Sutter’s Fort

  An American Western Historical

  By

  Jane Toombs

  Edited by Judith Pittman

  Calgary, Alberta

  Digital ISBNs

  EPUB 9781771458443

  Kindle 9781771458450

  WEB/PDF 9781771458467

  Print ISBN 9781771458436

  2nd Ed. Copyright 2016

  Cover Art Michelle Lee 2016

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Edited and Published in Canada.

  Chapter One

  It began, for some, during a poker game on the second floor of Bidwell’s Saloon on Montgomery Street.

  W.W. Rhynne, his face expressionless, had finished glancing from the two kings in his hand to the stacked pile of coins in the pot on the green baize table. W.W. had played a patient game, betting on his good hands, folding quietly on the bad. Now he’d bluffed for the first time, risking his entire stake, and he’d been called.

  “Let’s see the color of your cards,” McDowell demanded.

  Rhynne shrugged. He figured McDowell for three of a kind.

  “What’s that?” Garrison, on Rhynne’s left, looked up, startled. What he’d heard was a shout from the street below, and it was quite loud.

  “It’s Sam Brannan,” a man at the window reported, “Appears he’s back from Sutter’s Fort.”

  A burly man threw open the saloon door and came running upstairs. His black hair was tangled, his clothes disheveled.

  “Gold!” Sam Brannan shouted. “Gold! Gold from the American River!” Waving a whisky bottle above his head he pushed his way back through the small, curious crowd that had followed him up. A few seconds later Rhynne heard his booming voice downstairs again. “Gold! Gold from the American River!”

  All the poker players rushed down after Brannan, leaving their drinks unfinished, their cards scattered on the tables.

  All, that is, except Rhynne. For perhaps five minutes W.W. sat quietly smoking his cigarillo. Then, unblinking, he scooped the silver coins from the table and dropped them into his money belt. One by one he turned over McDowell’s cards. Three tens.

  He stood up then, smoothing the short cloak he favored over the money belt, nodding to himself as though in confirmation. All you needed was patience. Patience and a little luck.

  * * *

  Lady Pamela Buttle-Jones, her daughter Selena on the wagon seat beside her, drove down dusty Market Street toward the cluster of canvas-and-wood structures of San Francisco, she wiped her eyes with a handkerchief. Was it worth the effort? She asked herself. Should we have given up the place in Monterey? Yet the money was almost gone and she was worried about Selena.

  “We should have stayed another week in Santa Clara,” Selena said, a bit petulantly. “You aren’t well enough to travel.”

  “When I die, I promise you it will not be of the intermittent fever. Did you want to linger at Santa Clara because of my health or was Don Diego the actual reason?”

  Her daughter stared down at her hands, saying nothing.

  Pamela took a deep breath and gazed around them. “Isn’t it beautiful, Selena? Look at the ships in the bay, the blue water and the green hills beyond. They’re almost as green as the hills of England. But here the sky’s so azure, so enormous.”

  Selena looked at her mother. “I feel there’s something wrong. Something odd—don’t you sense it?”

  “The people,” Pamela said slowly. “Where is everybody? Eleven in the morning and the streets are deserted.”

  They both turned toward the water. “The bay’s so quiet, no lighters coming from the ships,” Selena said. “And look at the ships themselves, there’s no one on the decks.”

  Pamela gasped. “Could it be the cholera? Could we be entering a city of the dead?”

  “We’d smell the cholera.” Selena’s nose crinkled. “Remember the terrible odor when the men died on the overland trail?”

  “Well, at least there’s one survivor,” Pamela said dryly. She pointed to a bewhiskered man sitting on a bench in front of a general store with a brandy bottle in his lap. As they approached in their wagon, the man carefully set the bottle on the ground beside him, grasped a cane, and hobbled into the street. They saw then that he had a wooden right leg.

  “Mary, Joseph, and Jesus,” he said, staring up at the women. “Have I died and gone to heaven? There could never be two such angels in San Francisco.”

  Selena blushed, but Pamela only shook her head impatiently. “Where is everyone?” she asked him.

  “Gone to the diggings, the diggings on the American River. John Marshall’s found gold at Sutter’s Mill and now they’ve all packed up and bolted. There’s maybe a score of us left here in town. I’d be up on the river myself but for this.” He tapped his peg-leg with the end of his cane. “A wound I suffered chasing Santa Anna,” he added.

  “More likely you got drunk and shot yourself,” Pamela told him.

  The man squinted up at her. “I knew ‘twas too good to be true,” he said. “‘Tis hell I’m in after all.” He hobbled back toward his bench.

  “The Parker House,” Pamela called after him. “Where do I find the Parker House?”

  The one-legged man waved his hat in the direction of the bay. “On the plaza,” he muttered, barely loud enough for them to hear.

  He sat watching them until they turned onto Montgomery Street and disappeared from view. He shook his head. What were two such lovely colleens doing in this hell-hole? They wouldn’t last a month, if that long. Yet the older one, she was sharp as a Bowie knife. How could she have known how he’d lost his leg?

  * * *

  Danny Kennedy rapped once on the door, waited, knocked twice, waited, and knocked three times. The bolt slid back and the door of the small house in St. Louis opened a crack.

  “Ah, Danny.” His father, hidden in the shadows, opened the door just wide enough to let the younger man slip into the room. The shades were drawn and a single gas jet glowed yellow on the wall.

  “Did you sign us on the wagon train?” Michael Kennedy asked.

  “I did.”

  “And signed the names we agreed to?”

  “That I did. Michael O’Lee and Daniel O’Lee.”

  “Good. In another week we’ll be far from this city of tribulation.” Michael poured an inch of whiskey into a drinking glass. “Danny?” The boy shook his head.

  “‘Tis the inspiration and the curse of the Irish,” his father said, wiping his lips with the back of his sleeve. “Danny, read the letter again.”

  Danny went to the bed where he lifted the mattress and brought out three creased and tattered sheets of paper. He smoothed the letter on the table. “Shall I read from the beginning?”

  “No, just the one part.”

  Danny nodded and began reading: “Men returning here from the mines report persons have collected as much as a pound of gold in a single day valued at over two hundred dollars. The gold is so plentiful it lies mingled with the sand in the beds of the rivers. During bright days it glitters so as almost to dazzle and blind the eyes.”

  Michael Kennedy, now Michael O’Lee, nodded to his son. “I can almost see it Danny, a shining mountain of gold waiting for us at the end of the rainbow in California.”

  * * *

  Kingman Sutton spread the Augusta Chronicle and Gazette on the table beside the lamp. “B
etsy,” he said, “let me read you the correspondence from Washington.”

  Betsy Sutton turned from him with tears in her eyes.

  “Here,” King said, ignoring her tears for the common occurrence they were. “Listen to President Folk’s report to the Congress:

  “It was known that mines of the precious metals existed to a considerable extent in California at the time of its acquisition. Recent discoveries render it probable that these mines are more extensive and valuable than was anticipated. The accounts of the abundance of gold in that territory are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were it not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service, who have visited the mineral district, and derived the facts which they detail from personal observation.”

  Betsy folded her hands on the table, laid her forehead on them, and sobbed.

  King Sutton walked around the table to stand behind her, placing one hand on her shoulder. “Is there anything you want?” he asked. “Is there anything I can do?” When she shook her head, King bent and kissed her auburn hair, then smoothed it with his fingers. When he felt the tug of her hair catching on the setting of his opal ring he carefully untwisted the strands before taking his hand away. Betsy didn’t seem to notice.

  For a long while he stared down at his wife, then at the wavering light of the lamp. The reflection of the flame in his eyes was the color of gold.

  Chapter Two

  Selena twisted and turned on the narrow bed. She ran her hands over her nightgown along her thighs, upward over her hips to her waist, up to the swell of her breasts, then hugged herself.

  What if the hands on her body were not her own but Don Diego’s?

  Selena shivered pleasurably, wide awake now. It was about midnight. She stared at the only light in the room, the dim rectangle of the room’s single window. Outside a man shouted drunkenly on the street, his wild howl reminding her of the coyotes on the trail.

  There were so many men here in San Francisco, so many kinds—dull and exciting, short and tall, fair and dark, coarse and genteel, and in every combination thereof. During the night, Selena had dreamed she sat on a throne, be robed and crowned like young Queen Victoria, while men came to her, kneeling one by one at her feet, some requesting boons and largesse, others to be knighted.

  Don Diego had been one of the men. In her dream, Selena had stood, raising a sword in both hands, and lain the blade on his shoulder. When he looked up at her with his piercing brown eyes, her hand on the sword trembled.

  One man refused to kneel in her dream. He stood apart, in its shadows, watching her, and, though she saw his features only darkly, she knew he was smiling scornfully at her. Then, as more men came to pay her homage she became impatient, hastening the ceremony until at last there was no one left except the man watching from the shadows. Yet when she handed her sword to a courtier and approached the man, he was gone, leaving only the echo of his laugh and the impression of mocking blue eyes behind.

  Selena frowned, striving to shut out the noises from the street. When they’d arrived in San Francisco the town had been almost deserted, the men at the gold fields. Day by day they had trickled back—some from the American River, others arriving from the south, from the capital at Monterey and from the City of the Angels. Now the town was livelier than ever. She wished the Parker House didn’t have gambling rooms on the first floor. There was no quiet until long after midnight.

  At last Selena slept again, a troubled sleep, for how long she did not know. She came awake with a start—someone was in the room. Her forehead was damp, the air close and oppressive.

  All around her the hotel slept. Her eyes searched the darkness. She saw nothing. Even the window was now dark.

  Selena sat up, her legs against her chest, her hands gripping the nightgown below her knees. When a board creaked, her stomach tightened and a scream rose in her throat. But she held back the cry. Foolishness, her mother would tell her. You were the one who insisted on a room of your own, she would say.

  A horse whinnied outside--a man shouted in the distance. Vaguely Selena remembered hearing, when she’d awakened this second time, the clip-clop of horses from the street. She relaxed. She was being foolish. What was the matter with her lately? So restless, so quick to lash out at others, particularly at her mother. Now she felt an undefined longing. Tears came to her eyes.

  A hand suddenly closed over her mouth, stifling her gasp.

  A hand grasped her shoulder.

  “Senorita Selena.” She knew that voice. “It is Diego,” he said even before she could think the name. “I have come for you.”

  A light flared. Selena, wide-eyed, saw Diego’s dark face close to hers. Behind him were two other men. All three were dressed in black. A rolled kerchief was thrust between her lips, parting them, and she felt it being knotted at the back of her head. Then Diego was lifting her, carrying her to the door.

  “Do not have fear,” he whispered. “I will not harm you.” He cradled her in his arms with one hand gripping her legs, the touch of his fingers seeming to sear the thin cloth of the nightgown.

  One of the men brought her scarlet cloak from the wardrobe and Diego let her stand, wrapping the cape around her before taking her in his arms again.

  “My mother,” she tried desperately to say. But her words were muffled by the cloth in her mouth so that not even she could hear them.

  “Vamos,” Diego said to the others.

  One of the men went ahead, signaling to them with a wave of his hand when he found the hallway deserted. Diego carried her down the stairs with the third man following. In the empty lobby a single oil-lit chandelier glowed overhead. The gambling rooms were dark and quiet. The Seth Thomas ticked loudly. Four-thirty, it was; Selena saw that now.

  The three men crossed the lobby with their shadows rising and falling demon-like on the walls. In the street three horses waited quietly at the hitching rail, the light from the hotel glinting from their silver trappings.

  Diego lifted Selena so that she sat side-saddle, then swung up behind her. With one arm circling her waist and the other on the reins, he turned to his companions. “Ay, amigos,” he whispered.

  Urging their horses forward they crossed the square at a walk, starting a gallop only when on the hill leading from town. Then they sped up a trail silvered by a full moon haloed by fog.

  At the top of the first rise Diego reined in and Selena found herself gazing back at the scattered lights of San Francisco. She did not know what to think or what to feel about her abduction, her mind was a jumble.

  A blast roared in her ear. She cringed against Diego. When she smelled the acrid odor of gunpowder she realized one of the men had fired his pistol in the air. Diego laughed, then turned his horse to the south.

  As they rode, Selena became increasingly aware of Diego’s body pressed to hers, his chest hard on her back, his leg hard on her buttock. He had wanted her, she thought, suddenly thrilled. Like a knight errant of old, he had carried her off, risking the wrath of the world, defying all for love.

  As the motion of the horse lulled her, she imagined them coming to a sylvan meadow, the other two vaqueros riding on, leaving her alone with Diego. The two of them would stand on a rocky crag watching the sun rise over the Sierras, his arm about her waist, his lips teasing her hair as he confessed his love. She would enter the circle of his arms, her body straining to his, her lips yielding.

  Diego. He was a man. He was confident. Not like those she’d known on the wagon-trail west, awkward, fumbling. . . .

  She felt Diego’s hand at the nape of her neck seeking the knot of the kerchief. The cloth loosened and fell from her mouth and she rubbed her sore lips.

  “My mother,” she said. ‘‘My mother will be furious.”

  Yet it was mock rue only. Her mother, who always had men hovering around her, Barry Fitzpatrick on the trail and now that stuffy Robert Gowdy, wasn’t the only attractive woman men found desirable.

  Diego lau
ghed. “You are such a child. Do not fear. I will tell your mother.”

  Selena stiffened. A child! He thought of her as a child! Wasn’t she nineteen? When the time came she would show him she was a woman! When they reached—where?

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “To Rancho de la Torre. There, in two days’ time, we will be married.”

  “Married?”

  “Of a certainty. You will become Senora Selena de la Torre.”

  Nonplused, she could think of nothing to say.

  “We will have una fiesta grande” Diego was saying. He spoke grandly, emphasizing his Spanish words lovingly. “We will mount the best of the horses, each decorated with silver, your horse covered with a cloth sewn with silks of gold and with pieces of iron and copper so the horse makes a sound like many bells. The man who will be the godfather of our first child will ride to the chapel with you. The godmother rides with me. After the ceremony we, you and I, return together, as we ride now. At the rancho the vaqueros seize me to remove my spurs. I must redeem them with the gift of a bottle of aguardiente.

  “We enter the casa and we kneel before my father to ask his blessing. When he gives it I raise my hand and the guitars play and the fandango begins.”

  “The fandango?”

  “The dance. We dance and we drink and we sleep and we dance and we drink and we sleep again. We have contests, bull and bear baiting, drawing the cock. For two days, perhaps for three days, who can say? My Selena, you have never seen the like of such a fiesta.”

  Picturing herself whirled from man to man, hearing their admiring shouts, seeing the eyes of the senoritas envying her as Diego claimed her and bore her off, Selena rested her head against his chest and blissfully slept.