The Dead Spend No Gold Read online

  THE DEAD SPEND NO GOLD

  Bigfoot and the California Gold Rush

  By

  Duncan McGeary

  “Duncan McGeary is an accomplished writer who knows how to tell a great story.” ~ Mike Richardson, Emmy award winning producer and founder of Dark Horse Comics

  - BOOKS of the DEAD -

  Smashwords Edition

  LOVE READING?

  Sign up for BOOK-ie and find the best deals.

  It's free!

  “There’s monsters in them thar hills, and the weird west was never wilder. ‘The Dead Spend No Gold’ is a fine tale to be spun around some High Sierra campfire—as long as you don’t mind lying awake all night, wondering what that sound was off there in the trees…” ~ Jim Cornelius, Frontier Partisans

  This book is a work of fiction. All characters, events, dialog, and situations in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except in the case of reprinted excerpts for the purpose of reviews.

  THE DEAD SPEND NO GOLD

  Bigfoot and the California Gold Rush

  BOOKS of the DEAD

  Copyright 2014 by Duncan McGeary

  Edited by Lara Milton

  Cover Design by Andy Zeigert

  For more information, contact: [email protected]

  Visit us at: Booksofthedeadpress.com

  * * *

  Dedicated to Gearge and Libby McGeary, who raised me in a library.

  FOREWORD

  Virginia Reed Gerard, New York City, 1920

  They don’t want you to know the truth of what lured the Donner Party to their deaths in the Sierra Nevada, nor do they want me to speak of the systematic slaughter of the Indian tribes in California, far greater than in any other part of the United States. It is said that nine out of ten of the native inhabitants there were killed, all in pursuit of gold. But I cannot rest easy until the truth is told of that first eventful year of the Gold Rush, when I once again found myself confronted with the strange and mysterious. After long years of pondering my own journals and those of others, I have reconstructed the truth, as best I understand it.

  CHAPTER 1

  Tucker’s Journal, Autumn, 1848

  In the mornings, a sliver of light winds its way into the cave through a curtain of trees. It is just a small ray, but it ignites the walls of gold and washes the darkness in a soft, silky iridescence. For a moment, I’m allowed to gaze upon the riches I will never spend.

  After all, dead men spend no gold.

  My partner and I labored for long, hard months searching for even a nugget of the precious metal, and yet here I lie, surrounded by more gold than any pharaoh, more than any medieval king ever had, more riches than Beowulf himself found in the dragon’s hoard; here, in Grendel’s cave.

  But the monster will not let me leave. I know this now. He will never let me leave.

  It should have been so easy. We should have found the precious metal glinting at us from the rocky streambeds. Having set out from our homes in San Francisco, Kovac and I reached the gold fields before most others. From the start, we heard stories of newly arriving miners simply plucking gold nuggets from the ground, but bad luck plagued us.

  After some horrific experiences (that I may confess in this journal, but not yet!), we struck out overland in an attempt to distance ourselves from the others. The soft, sandy soil should have been easy to walk on, but the uneven footing exhausted us. Dust coated our trousers to the knee. The loudest noise in the quiet woods was the sound of our own grumbling bellies.

  Though others seemed to be finding gold with every strike of the pickaxe, Kovac insisted on searching farther north. So it was that we climbed the cinder cone foothills, where landslides had laid bare the red and black lava cinders beneath the surface. The air was cool, but the sun was hot. At night, we camped among the ponderosas. I would idly break apart the orange jigsaw bark and then try to reassemble it as Kovac described the riches we would find. We were above the sandy desert soil by then, and the pine needles were so thick that they filled the spaces between the clumps of grass, making a soft carpet for us to rest on.

  Eventually, we reached Bidwell’s Bar, a town that had sprung up overnight at the base of Thompson Peak. After reprovisioning there, we continued on. We followed the North Fork of the Feather River farther up than any of the other miners, certain we would find the very source of the yellow metal, the mother lode. All around us, miners cried out “Eureka!” while we dug and scrabbled in bare, rocky ground.

  “That’s all downwash, I tell you,” Kovac said, sneering at the riches of the others. “The mother lode is all ours. We just have to find it. ”

  All ours—all of nothing. I should have left Kovac to his delusions, but the wealthier others became, the more I wanted to believe that sooner or later we’d strike a vein richer than all the rest. Higher and higher we climbed. The wind whispered through the swaying pines, the dark green needles shimmering against the pure blue sky.

  It was tempting, after everything that had happened to us, to believe that this place was paradise. Perhaps Eden itself. Perhaps we had returned as poor sinners to the very place from which God banished mankind. If so, Kovac was the serpent, leading me to the knowledge of riches I could never spend. It was a strange sort of paradise, for scattered about the ground were weathered bones, the natural charnel house of the wilderness.

  But we were blind to the bones and the silent warning they held. Instead, we wandered farther up the creek until, at last, we found the wellspring. We could go no further, for an endless expanse of rock blocked our path.

  It was pure accident that we stumbled across our destiny.

  As darkness fell, we camped by the stream, utterly discouraged, unwilling even to speak. Kovac wandered behind a wall of trees to relieve himself, and there he found our cursed fortune. Perhaps on any other night, we would have missed it. But on this night, the moonlight curved inside just brightly enough to illuminate the darkness of the cave.

  Inside was a miraculous grotto of gold. Oh, not a grotto with gold in it: no, this cave was made of nothing but gold, the walls lined from end to end with the gleaming brilliance of pure, silky metal. It was impossible. It was a dream.

  I somehow knew from the start that we were cursed.

  My partner was an older man, more patient than I. At first, he didn’t load himself down with the gold, but watched and laughed as I snatched handfuls of nuggets.

  “Don’t be stupid, Kovac,” I said. “Fill your pockets with as much as you can carry. I don’t trust our damned luck.” I didn’t trust our friends, either; least of all my fellow miners. But most of all, I didn’t trust the Fates.

  “Hell, Tucker,” Kovac said, trailing his fingers over the smooth golden wall as he wandered deeper into the cave. “We’re gonna to be the richest men alive! A few nuggets ain’t nothin’.”

  “If you say so,” I muttered, shoveling nuggets into my rucksack.

  “What’s that smell?” Kovac asked.

  Straightening, I breathed deeper, finally acknowledging what we’d feverishly ignored. The cave stank, and the floor was littered with gore and bones.

  “Bear, probably,” I answered him. “Maybe cougar.”

  We drew and cocked our pistols.

  “Huh,” Kovac grunted. I heard the clacking of bones as he moved toward me, toward the entrance. “Best we leave off for the night. Come back in the morning.”

  My pockets were full to bursting as I followed him out.

  Daylight came after a sleepless night.

  When we pulled back the branches that obscured the en
trance, the cavern exploded with color, the sun illuminating the brilliance of the walls inside, reflecting an infinite mirror of riches.

  We filled our packs and our pockets with loose nuggets—Kovac now as eager as I—hardly speaking, hardly breathing, unable to believe our luck. If we’d stopped then, it might have been all right. We might have gotten away. But I wasn’t satisfied. I want to blame Kovac for everything, but it was my idea to strike the wall.

  I took my axe and, with all my might, swung it against the gleaming metal. The head sank several inches into the soft gold, and with a cry of triumph, I pried a chunk of gold the size of my head from the wall. It fell out of my hands as its weight caught me by surprise.

  I should have quit then. It was a sign. What use was a piece of gold so heavy I couldn’t carry away?

  But gold fever had taken me completely. As I struck the wall a second time, the metal walls boomed like a warning bell, growing louder with every echo. I dropped the ax, covering my ears until the reverberation stilled. In the silence that followed, we heard the sound of a single footstep, and our hearts stilled before beating in a wild staccato rhythm. The world seemed to pause, as if all creation waited with us for the doom that approached.

  I don’t know how we knew it was a footstep and not a falling rock, but we knew. It was only one footfall, but it shook the cave. Then came another step, and then…then we understood. The Beast approached, its footfalls rapid and thundering. The bones paving the floor bounced under the onslaught.

  It burst out of the darkness. It had the shape of a man, but was impossibly big, taller and wider than any human, covered in fur, and all we could see were its glaring eyes and snarling mouth. A grizzly, I thought, until I stared into those eyes and saw the malevolent intelligence there.

  We scrambled for the entrance of the cave, Kovac fumbling with his pistol. That must have been what slowed him, allowing me to push him aside as I got to the entrance before him.

  I pushed Kovac, my friend, my partner, aside as if he was nothing, no one. Later, I would shudder at my craven actions, and wince knowing I would do it again. I wanted to live. I’d never known how much; so much that I’d push a friend into danger to save myself.

  Kovac fell in the darkness, crying out for help, but I kept running. A single gunshot echoed behind me.

  And suddenly, the wild mountain air was filled with throaty, guttural screams, which no doubt stilled every living creature for miles. The smell of blood rose and blossomed in the air. Such an act of killing might normally have drawn scavengers, but instead, it surely caused them to flee. They knew to stay away from that cursed place.

  The screams stopped abruptly. I was alone. The only sounds were the scrabble of the scree shifting beneath my feet, pebbles sliding down the hillside, and my pack thumping against my body with every leap and step.

  I didn’t look back.

  The gold wasn’t heavy at first. My gibbering fear made the burden light. Then, as my breath rasped and my legs shook from fatigue, the gold became an anchor. But I couldn’t let it go, in spite of the danger. The gold dragged me down, every step more difficult than the last.

  Let it go, I thought. There is enough gold in that cave to last a lifetime.

  But I couldn’t. For six long, hard months we’d dug into the rocky soil of the High Sierra without finding so much as a nugget. I wasn’t about to give up my treasure—more gold than anyone else had yet found, more riches in my pockets than I’d ever seen. These weren’t rocks with tiny flecks of gold embedded in them: these were chunks of pure gold, unadulterated and glimmering.

  I ran downhill blindly, stumbling and falling again and again, the heavy rocks slamming me harder into the ground than I expected, gouging into my legs.

  It’s mine! I’m not letting it go! The desperate thought repeated over and over again in my mind, even as the pounding steps of my pursuer grew ever louder behind me. It’s mine!

  My breath felt hot and dry in my throat, and there was a stitch in my side, but I kept going downward. My cave of gold was above the tree line, and the footing had been loose shale at first. The going was getting easier now that I was among the trees, but the trees themselves became an obstacle course. I slammed into the branches of a mountain fir, which pushed back just enough to throw me sideways.

  A strangled sob escaped my throat as I almost lost my footing. I knew it was too good to be true. I knew my luck would desert me. I would never be rich. God was playing a big joke on me.

  I sensed the monster’s arms, those unnaturally long arms with human-looking hands and long, sharp claws on the ends of the fingers, reaching for me, mere inches from my back, ready to slice into me. I lunged forward, and it was as if the wind of the creature’s strike gave me strength. Again and again, I felt the jolt of fear, but each time, my body reacted a little more slowly, and each time, I was certain that the claws had come closer, nearly catching me.

  The gold became ever heavier. I could barely lift my feet off the ground.

  Let it go! I shouted in my mind, but my arms wouldn’t obey.

  Falling was inevitable. Something—a tree root, a rock—caught my foot and sent me rolling. I was spinning, gaining momentum. I had the wild thought that this might be good, that I could simply tumble down the mountain and out of danger.

  Then a rock caught the side of my head, and my thoughts became scrambled.

  What am I doing?

  The gold!

  Even as most other thoughts abandoned me, I remembered the gold.

  I’m a rich man!

  The pounding of the monster’s pursuit seemed to be inside my head. Strange. Rocks were rolling through my field of vision. I was lying on a steep hillside. The shale had collapsed, sliding downward, carrying me with it. I stared up at the clear blue brilliance of the mountain skies, panting. Then the sunlight dimmed and a huge presence loomed over me. Its features were shadowed and indistinct, but I felt its anger.

  Gold nuggets tumbled out of my pockets and clattered down the hillside as the Beast lifted me by my feet, swinging me through the air, faster and faster, almost like my father had when I was little boy.

  I sensed rather than saw the tree coming toward my head, feeling its shadow engulf me as the monster slowed my approach, saving me from a deathblow.

  Behind the brilliant sparks of light was darkness.

  CHAPTER 2

  Virginia’s skirt was hemmed above her boots. The other women of Sutter’s Fort considered this odd—considered her odd—but she didn’t care. It saved her from having to wash her clothes so often. A trio of old ladies was clustered on the wooden sidewalk ahead, staring at her from the corners of their eyes. They showed no sign of moving aside politely for her, so she veered out into the muddy road and trudged past, ignoring their whispers. Always the whispers.

  She readjusted the wicker basket containing the day’s bread from Johansson’s Bakery. It was the biggest basket she could carry, and by the time she arrived at the hotel, her arms were like to fall off. As she passed Howard’s General Store, a couple of men outside the store glanced up casually. They looked like a rancher and his son, in town for monthly supplies. An Indian dressed in white man's clothing stood behind them, and Virginia saw his eyes widen at the sight of her. She recognized that look.

  He whispered into the older man's ear, and she had a sinking feeling that she knew what was coming.

  The younger of the two ranchers was about her age, maybe eighteen or nineteen. He tipped his hat to her and smiled, and without thinking, she smiled back. His unruly dark hair and long lashes brought a pang to her heart. He looked much like Bayliss would have, had he lived. He started forward, perhaps intending to offer help with her burden. Virginia could have used a little kindness right then. She raised a knee to balance the basket on while she adjusted her grip yet again.

  The older man grabbed the youth’s arm and turned him around.

  “What, Father?” the young man exclaimed.

  “Leave her be, Frank,” the older m
an snapped, his white handlebar mustache hiding a scowl on his weathered face.

  “But she’s so beautiful,” the son whispered.

  Virginia kept walking, trying to ignore what was happening. To pretend it wasn’t happening.

  “No, Frank…that’s her,” the old man hissed.

  “Her?” The younger man looked puzzled. “What do you mean, ‘her’?”

  “Her, dammit. Remember? I told you she was living in these parts. You don’t want to be alone with her. Some winter’s night, hell, she might get hungry…”

  Frank’s eyes widened, and he turned and stared, then realized what he was doing and looked away. “Pity,” he muttered, glancing over his shoulder at Virginia. “Such a beauty.”

  Virginia averted her face, blushing. Strange that after all this time, people could still make her doubt herself, men and women whispering, pointing, making her feel as though she had done something wicked.

  She shook it off. They can embarrass me only if I let them.

  She raised her chin. She had nothing to be ashamed of. She’d done nothing wrong.

  Nonetheless, despite her brave front, Virginia was grateful to duck into the alley behind the hotel. It was her refuge. She spent most of her time staring out over this alley. Her tiny room at was the back of the hotel and had a small window from which she could see the far hills and forest.

  Sometimes, on clear days, she could see the Sierra Nevada, snowcapped and rugged. On those days, she averted her eyes and closed the curtains. It was at those times that the trauma of that horrible winter gnawed again at her belly and the visions of the creatures she had fought nearly overwhelmed her.