Slip-Slidin’ Down Gold Mountain
Edward Orem
A Salty Dog Production
Copyright registered 2017, U.S.A.
ISBN 978-1-365-98841-7
All rights reserved. You may not reprint any of this book for commercial purposes without prior authorization from the publisher.
Anyone using anything longer than a sentence in any other format—print, digital, electronic—is forbidden without said authorization.
Chapter Three
He sure looked like a down-and-out trail-scruff. Just a-hunkerin there in the dust, waiting. But shoot—coulda been anyone of hundreds of broke-dream prospectors who moseyed down that crudely cut wagon road in the low Sierras outside Saintsville. But this fella was a leetle bit outta sorts and a whole lotta tetchy. He was waiting for his next meal ticket to walk by.
After a few months of scratching dirt for those elusive, near-mythical gold nuggets, this gangly-thin ex-miner decided he’d had enough. He was Livingston Lowe, by God, and he was going to do what many red-blooded Americans would do: way-lay the first non-citizen (read: heathen, Chinee, Mex-greaser Californio, non-white) toting a purse that looked to be swollen more ‘n a healthy-sized bull scrotum.
He didn’t bother to conceal neither his hide, hair, nor intent, but just sat, scratched, and ruminated about his current ill state of affairs and the demise of his juiciest illusions.
+++
Livingston Lowe was born in Mt. Vernon, Mass., an enclave exclusive to many of the movers and shakers of nearby Boston town, in 1828. The family tree publicly counted him as the seventh generation of Lowe people in the New World, first seeded with Manford Lowe. It was widely spread that M. Lowe, Esq., was a London barrister who set down in Salem in 1630, with the first Massachusetts Bay Colony. And supposedly, Livingston’s grandfather Maxwell was the first in the clan to parcel out most of the genteel family farm and stoop to mercantilism.
But none of it was true. As point of an embarrassing, shadowy fact, Manford was sentenced to the Colonies in 1764 as a convict from Liverpool, and dubious commerce had always been the Lowe family life-style.
By his 16th birthday, Livingston apprenticed to the family shipping offices at the docks. His life’s story might have been written in stone.
Livingston was a diligent, intelligent worker, and after serving his apprenticeship, he was assigned to assist in keeping the firm’s export accounts in order. With such excellent prospects, any one of the other, more sensible family members would have stayed on with the company, reined in any wayward, untamed notions of ventures outside the tried-and-true, and consequently risen to a head office to carry on his family’s proper position of privilege.
But it was 1848, and the California Gold Rush fever had reached clear across the continent to stir the young merchant’s level of grasping acquisitiveness beyond the understanding of even this family of intent profiteers.
+++
The two young men were stripped to their suit vests, with billowy shirtsleeves rolled up, clutching cue-sticks. It was the weekly Saturday night 5-Ball smoker in the small building designated as the “gentlemen’s retreat” on the sprawling Lowe country estate in Mt. Vernon. The retreat was off-limits to women and children—well, to white women anyway.
In the background two middle-aged uncles, and his brother Lucius—functionaries all in the family shipping concern—frequently dipped their long Boston noses into gingerly cradled snifters, with the very serious intent of getting very ungentlemanly snockered.
Propriety demanded that all reputable citizens dress publicly in a manner that announced social status and office, no matter the event, so the men maintained the business wear of the day—even while getting smashed playing American pool. Each sported a linen pullover shirt with full sleeves, deep-button cuffs, a generous collar, and very long tails to tuck into wool trousers. (The tails were hardly decorative, as underpants for gentlemen were unheard of. Many a chap blessed the low-hanging tails for keeping his privates from chafing against the scratchy wool.)
The pants had straight, fairly slim legs, and a flap that buttoned to the waistband in front covered pockets on either side of the opening. A wrapped cravat covered the throat. A vest helped to hide the galluses holding up the trousers.
It was a cold early autumn, so they retained their double-breasted, woolen frock outdoor coats with thigh-length narrow skirt, in spite of the blaze roaring in the inglenook.
Livingston had quit his coat to better lean over the table to cue the ball. Unlike the clean-shaven older men, and against the wishes of his parents, he sported a mustache, thick with downward turning ends.
Even as he eyeballed the angles, 20 year-old Livingston was protesting his Uncle Ted’s line of reasoning. The older men could invariably rely on a debate from the youngest Lowe. Livingston espoused all the latest and far-fetched idealist themes of the day, whatever the discourse being bashed about in the opaque air of the robust bull sessions. The topic this night revolved around a recent riot at Market Square, near the family shipping dock.
Boston often suffered food shortages due to secretive warehousing by merchants, the shipping abroad of scarce grains (a tried and true marketing ploy by Lowe & Assoc. Shipping for decades), price manipulations of available basics, and outright lethal social injustices. The poor frequently got pissed-off, and reacted accordingly.
“I’m just saying that…” Livingston was back-pedaling. Should have known better than to butt heads with him. His Uncle Theodore—Teddy—loved to corner the boy between his slippery wall of logic and the hard rock of reality.
Teddy’s rangy, muscular frame poised to jump to the coup of the argument. His brothers often chided him for weaving somewhat mysterious and unfathomable airs. His dozen sailing ventures to India, the Malay Archipelago and China certainly didn’t help people understand him. He was both guarded and daring. Even his face hair announced this: in a clean-shaven urban society, his fringe of beard that jutted from his lower jaw to peak prominently under the chin raised eyebrows—and questions.
Livingston often pushed the man for accounts of his oriental voyaging, but Ted was close-mouthed, unless he was jibing the boy for sport.
“Why, what would happen,” Ted pressed, “if the disenfranchised—the savages, the slaves, the indentured workers, the Negroes—banded together in common cause?” He paused, but saw more understanding in Livingston’s cue stick than in his face. “You don’t see? Dear boy, that’s why we diminish the Indian!”
Livingston cracked the cue, stood up and shrugged. Where does he get this offal? And how does he sleep at night?
Teddy drew the last draft from his cigar, paused. “No? Come, come, catch up. That, my languishing nephew, gains the backing of the poor whites.”
Still no illumination, and Teddy sighed. Finally his words shot like blue darts through the cigar smoke. “A perfect example of increasing the frustration of the poor against another faction of poor—“
“Expending their anger of prejudice on each other, then?” Livingston was provoked and aghast.
“Instead of on us, yes,” threw in Uncle Harold, sprawled atop the battered teakwood seaman’s chest in the corner.
“How barbarous, Uncle!”
“I, for one, would have them at each others’ throats than at ours, the class of consequence. Yes, indeed.” Teddy leaned back in the Paris-designed chaise-lounge, reached over for his Jamaican rosewood humidor, pulled out another thick Cuban puro.
“But surely there must be an option to maintaining this-this violent frustration?”
“By means decent and moral and just, you say?” asked brother Lucius, and missed his shot.
“Never met an indecent bank note, myself,” put in Uncle Harold, pulling heavily on his hot rum toddy.
All but Livingston appreciated Harold’s wit. They were in full swing now; oh, but how they loved to bait the boy.
“But-but tell me what is democratic or egalitarian about a system dominated by men accustomed to purchasing loyalty with lucre and obedience with force?” he pleaded. But he was playing to an empty house.
“Ever tried to get a man to work on our ships by asking him politely and promising nothing?” Harold chided.
“Comes down to this,” Teddy pointed out. “You acquire the wherewithal to prevail upon other men to do your work, or you work for others, at a wage they determine.”
Livingston thought he saw a way out, and went for it. “Therein rests my reasoning for wanting to depart for California, uncles.” It had been a point of contention among the family for months.
“Gold mining in California does have the knell of intrepidness about it, Livingston,” mused Lucius as he waited his turn. Lucius was often chided as somewhat foppish, with his silk cravats that changed colors each day of the week, tidily manicured nails, a partiality for sporting slipper-like dancing shoes as street-wear, and an insistence on a warm bath twice weekly. His confirmed proclivity for brusque, masculine women and delicately high-strung young men had earned him the titles of “Luscious Butts, Boston’s luminary of the pas de trois,” and the “Ambiguous Chameleon.”
“Indeed, nephew, this venture of yours smacks of imprudence,” joined Harold between sips. Harold was decidedly exhibiting the tendency of the older men of the family toward a girth that made playing 5-Ball—or even cards, for that matter—a challenge. Ever since he turned 50, he didn't even bother to get up during the long evening, and concerned himself with calling for more duck and ham sandwiches or another flagon of rum, and, as the night drew on, simply keeping his wig on his head.
“Esteemed uncles, dear Lucius, I assure you…” Livingston banked a ball off a center post to make a corner shot. He straightened his back, smiled and continued: “…that I realize there is no prospect in remaining in such a far-off and savage hinter-land.”
“I should say not,” rejoined Lucius. “Being so far removed from the proper concerns of polite society.”
“Not to mention, beyond the appropriate concerns of business,” Harold pointed out.
“But that is precisely the point, don’t you see,” rationalized Livingston. “I just want to quickly reap my profits from that empty land, then—“ He was interrupted by a knock on the door. “Come!”
A male Negro servant in livery entered and bowed. “Massah Liv’ston, suh, your fathah and muthah be askin fuh yus in the library. Dey say, rat now, suh.”
Livingston leaned his cue stick against the table. “That, after all, gentlemen, is the tried and true American way.” He grabbed his coat from the rack, and sauntered toward the door. “By your leave, I’m off to render penance and receive absolution.”
The men chuckled indulgently, and lifted their snifters in adieu.
Livingston was quite correct: His was the tried and true American way, after all--the way of several generations of American Lowe’s, and the path that his people had followed for countless centuries before. Sea otters, beaver, and longhorn cattle had magnetized California for exploitation by Europeans in the previous two centuries. Now gold was the new lodestone for the new Americans.
It was a matter of pride to young Livingston that he demonstrate his inherited skill and acumen in such an aggressive business venture: an All-American lad joining a flood of hundreds of thousands of other such ruddy lads rushing West.
As Livingston jogged the 50 yards to the main house, a four-tier, 16,000 square foot Federal brick design by Boston’s eminent Dalyrymple Finchling, the grounds didn’t even register in his consciousness.
Created by none other than Downing Jackdrew, the leading architect of country house and landscape gardening, the Lowe country retreat featured the work of European arborists with skillfully-placed Norway Maples, London Plane trees, and Sherwood Lindens accentuating the classic English Boxwood. The labyrinths counter-pointed the many romantic English country gardens of summer, pink and red climbing roses smothering white trellises, porticoes dripping with honey blossom and the several ponds that graced the 50 acres.
Visitors gushed over the fastidious yet sinuous design of the Lowe family estate, but for Livingston it was somebody else’s scheme for a pre-determined life. He was bustin’ to leap the boxwood mazes.
Livingston bounded the back steps two at a time, rushed into the mud room, into the mammoth kitchen, barely brushing elbows with the kitchen help rolling pies and plucking geese, on through the swinging doors into the dining area, down the lower West Wing hall, through the portico, up the winding Italian marble staircase, left onto the second-story East Wing, lurch down that hall three doors, and stop!
He screeched to a halt in front of one of the many full-length mirrors to check his appearance and nervously straighten his clothes. Sandy hair kempt, cravat straight, face clean—large nose included—a bit too spare and gangly for nearly 21, perhaps.
And still a virgin, dammit, but a face that’s full of promise for all that, he assessed. Bloody hell! Where’s my frock coat?
He tapped the library door lightly. The massive red oak door always busted his knuckles when he knocked hard. He shoved hard, because he knew the damned room-sized Kashan carpet was thick at the corner. And he stumbled, as usual, on the rolled edge.
“Oh, Livingston do sit down, over here,” his mother, Harriet, directed. She set aside the house accounts ledger for the moment.
Livingston saw that his mother’s toilet was the usual: a floor-length gray silk dress with brocades of dark vermilion roses and spotted with jet beads to the height of about twelve inches. Precisely proper for an evening at home, he mused. And looking as though she were in a perpetual state of slight mourning.
Even so, she was a startling woman, even at first glance, for the bone-white hue of her skin. This tone, plus her being painfully thin with dark, receding circles beneath pale blue eyes, with a coif that parted her grey hair in the middle then drawn back tightly over the ears, and her low, measured manner of speaking, sobered men right up when they locked onto her penetrating stare.
“Yes, do something coordinated like that,” Livingston’s father chided, “before you break another objet d’art from half-way round the world.”
His mother cast a glance of annoyance towards Manson. Still, her husband did have a point. That darling Chippendale inlaid mahogany mirror with top and bottom scrolled crests (oval gold-leaf inlay and urns of flower and leaves) was just a sweet memory since Livingston hit his stumbling growth era.
Then there’s father’s collection of maritime artifacts…and Harriet began her unconscious internal dialog, ticking off the rooms contents, their worth and attributes:
One mahogany Marine Stick Barometer by Reynolds & Wiggins, London, excellent condition, crafted to order for Lowe Shipping with customized ivory registers for thermometer and hygrometer, brass cistern and carved foliate bottom. Dearly expensive;
One Ship’s Chandlers Box, reputedly from a 13th Century Persian vessel. Incalculably valuable;
One 500 year-old ivory model carving of the “Mora,” the ship used by William the Conqueror when he invaded England in 1066. An exceedingly rare and precious piece;
A large bronze eagle; standing two feet high, the spread-wing statue was said to come from a pilot house of one of Sir Walter Raleigh’s warships that cut down the Spanish Armada. Pristine condition, exorbitantly costly;
And, of course, Father’s assortment of five Royal Marine “swagger” sticks from five continents, each carved with a different animal motif. Value questionable…
The canes were reposing in a four-foot high rose medallion Tang palace vase--a gift from Teddy when he came home from Peking. That vase was kept between the two parents, well-receded from Livingston’s normal traffic lanes in the room. Her eyes swept over it lovingly: adorned with flowers, birds and butterflies, Harriet loved its handles shaped like Foo dogs. No way was she going to let him bumble into that.
The centerpiece of the patriarch’s marine collection was the large ship model of the steam and sail yacht “Maxine.” Designed in 1824 by Admiral John Mellan at Bath Ironworks, Maine, to Manson’s specs as the flagship of his fleet, the full-sized “Maxine” was at this moment hauled up in South End for scraping and re-fitting for yet another of Theodore’s oriental trading missions. Manson’s ship was one of only 51 construction commissions the Admiral had deigned to accept.
The model was painstakingly crafted with an extraordinary attention to detail, and now exhibited within an inlaid mahogany and glass custom-fitted case sequestered behind white cordons supported by four brass stanchions in the middle of the commodious library. The roped area had appeared only in the past few years, when Livingston had reached puberty and markedly accelerated levels of ungainliness.
Mellan’s portrait hung nearby, alongside another oil on canvas titled, “Seascape with Boats.”
Livingston watched his mother’s eyes, as they accounted and tallied and appraised. He was disgusted by that habit, and made a little tight corner with his mouth.
“Why are you looking at me like that, Livingston?” she shot immediately.
The two parents were comfortably ensconced in their chairs between stacks and rows of books along three walls, mostly religious and naval and law tomes. Harriet fancied her large upholstered Flemish chair with scroll ends and leaf carving on the arms.
His father loved the inlaid blue upholstered mahogany Sheraton style settee he was sprawled on. He was able to prop much of his short self, plump as a biscuit, up on its length—both legs included—and read at this unusual leisure when not entertaining guests.
Father’s dress mode had changed little in the last 40 years, still preferring knee-length pantaloons, with buckles, silk stockings, and low-cut shoes. And he still covered his stubbly head with a wig, no matter the weather or place. The tail coat never came off, either; well, it changed according to the season, but was always wool or linen fully-lined with silk, and double breasted with collars cut so that the silk damask vest showed beneath. His shirts were white linen with ruffles and the neck and sleeves.
Much to Harriet’s dissatisfaction, Manson was crafting a blue shroud of smoke around the settee with his clay Tavern pipe. It wasn’t the smoking that perturbed his wife, but the commonness of the 16" pipe. This was the 18th Century tavern-style smoker, where patrons broke a little off the tip when they were done, so the next person received a new end. Its historically shared quality piqued her sensibilities. Manson liked it precisely because it did remind him of the past, and besides, they were getting hard to find.
Across the room was a mahogany Chippendale slant front desk, with four graduated drawers, an interior with eight cubbyholes and six drawers, and a center carved door with two drawers and two cubbyholes. Another objet d’art that was off-limits to Livingston for the past seven years.
“I know what you were doing, mother,” Livingston accused.
She didn’t respond directly, didn’t have to, but just narrowed her eyes in warning, and off-handedly motioned to the chair at the desk. “We are saddened to see you trifle off like this--
“On the other hand,” broke in his father, Manson, setting aside the Boston Globe and raising one finger in instruction, “`We ought to march from ocean to ocean, direct to the Pacific. It is the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race.’”
“Manson, dear, you really should identify the source when you do that,” Harriet chided.
“Quite right: Congressman John Globe.” Manson returned to his newspaper and wine flagon.
If Madeira and laudanum could talk... mused Livingston. The oft-recited fireside dialogs were neither unique nor unfamiliar, and almost proverbial in tone as well theme. Hoping to heat his ass to distraction, Livingston sidled up to the small blaze in the hearth. “Mother, we have been over this so often that surely you have my response memorized by now?”
“Yes, yes—testing your mettle, and all that,” she responded. “Still…”
“Even so, you’re about to place yourself in an unsavory social ambience, with which you have little experience,” Manson said, lowering the newspaper a moment.
“You may thank the Lord and your parents for that absence of experience,” Harriet sniffed.
“In fact, Livingston, we Lowe’s have maintained our status by embracing our obligations of privilege,” began Manson. “‘In every time, there must be some rich, others poor, some elevated and eminent in power and dignity, with others in a base and submissive condition.’” Manson paused to clear his throat importantly.
“And that was Gov. John Winthrop, dear,” noted Harriet.
“Our Founding Fathers... ”
The heavy specter of a ponderous lecture suddenly loomed over Livingston. He groaned audibly, collapsed into the nearest chair, and would have slouched back out of sight into a small cave of his own making, but the damn Sheraton style design foresaw such shenanigans by the shirkers of the world. The furniture poked his back, made his chin jut out, and his knees knocked solidly against thin chair legs.
Manson continued with his soliloquy: “--the Fathers were right on the mark when they declared all men equal--that is, of course, all free men--Are you listening, Livingston?”
That a “man” was defined as a freeman of property, position, and influence (i.e. a member of their governing class) was as implicit between them as bedrock.
“But—but—” Livingston was trying to muster a weak reply, not out of conviction of protest, but rather from understanding that interruption of their soliloquies was expected of him—just as he had obediently memorized passages from dialogues of the classical Greeks. “How can we be sure of such a permanent state for any human being? Might a man not rise up to unforeseen circumstance by virtue of his own diligence and skill? Or even by the Grace of God?” Livingston was proud of his correctly formed rebuttal.
Manson went on as if not hearing. “The Lowe’s—and, well, the other families that matter—“
Maybe nobody’s heard of Boston Brahmins in California… Livingston consoled himself.
“--we have the custom of accepting inequality of others as a simply deplorable, but necessary, price to pay for progress. A submissive acceptance of conquest in the name of civilization.”
“But father,” he complained, “If sacrifice is to be made for the sake of progress, shouldn’t those to be sacrificed have a say in the decision? How can you be sure that the sacrificed is inferior?”
“Still indulging in that, that liberalism, Livingston?” Harriet chided. “Dear boy, it is not for us to meddle in the appointments of God.”
“You see, Harriet? Did I not warn you to keep him from those Transcendalist meetings?”
Harriet sighed. “Oh, perhaps San Francisco is a fitting destination...”
Manson rumbled his throat as a preamble once more. “The fact remains that our family—you—owe the underclass nothing, for they have not shouldered their responsibility. ‘Money is the most powerful force in the nation.’”
“Rev. Theodore Parker, dear,” piped in Harriet.
Livingston was incredulous; this was too much, not in its content, but in the frankness of his father’s speech. “What? You can’t mean they are not deserving as humans?”
“Why yes—that is exactly what I intend,” Manson said, shoring up his trespass of polite réparteé. “They have not acquired, by birth or by decree or effort, neither the freedom of citizenry nor the right to pursue happiness through property and influence.”
His mother bolstered her husband’s instruction. “They are chattel, dear. And it is your privilege—nay, it is your family and class duty—to offer them the opportunity to support you in your exaltations throughout your life.”
“Let me ask you this, Livingston,” his father shook out the newspaper. “Says here, ‘There is no evidence that more than one in a thousand Americans consider the Irish as racially inferior, non-white or ape-like.’ A lower category of human, in other words. What do you think?”
“I'm w-w-wondering, father, why you object so strongly to Roman Catholics.”
“Oh, Livingston,” his mother exclaimed, “that’s because you don’t know them like we do--so irrational and superstitious!”
“Not to mention ignorant and unclean,” his father put in.
“We never had one as a nanny for you children,” said Harriet. “No telling what you’d learn, left alone with a Roman Catholic Irish! Imagine!”
“Imagine,” Manson murmured, still reading.
“But-but you have Kathleen and Mary cooking for us, handling our food!” Livingston objected.
“Yes, but they converted last year,” Harriet informed, returning to her house accounts. “Besides, they work for pittance.”
“Pittance,” Manson muttered.
Livingston was jittering inside with discomfort, and yet the frank, overt staging of this paradigm of the privileged gave him pause. It was nearly embarrassing. He hadn’t processed the ideas consciously before because there had been no need. The position of advantage was in his bones, put there by birthright and by countless thousands of interactions with commoners who, on command, lowed like cattle and submitted like sheep.
But aloud he only said, “Why, yes, I see, father. I think I understand you, mother.”
“And I am quite certain that you do not,” Harriet snapped. She leaned forward to lock eyes with her youngest child. “This duty of the underclass must be enforced by the instruments of government. Conversely, it is your duty as loyal and propertied citizen--”
“Please, Mother, I—“Livingston started to protest.
“Do not,” Manson cut in firmly, “under any circumstances, allow the vagaries of a weakened resolve tempt you into a sympathy for those not enfranchised by God. Such thoughts are unholy, seditious, and disloyal to the family tree your great-great-grandfather Manford took such pains to plant here.” He leaned back to indicate he felt his point to be well-cinched.
Manford! thought Livingston. I know more than you think about that scallywag imposter.
