Dusty Books, Frontier Librarian

Chapter 6

The Voyage planned... Commodity Price Fluctuations... A Street of Stoves... A cartoon... A cask for Alvin... Good advice about Gold Fever, unheeded... Fireside Conversation and Corn Liquor... An Oath in VooDoo... A confidence shared... A revelation...

Since Sacramento was my port of call Alvin said with the water this high and the current, to fight it would be about 9 days to navigate about 4 of which would be very treacherous. When the river is wide the water has someplace to go, where it narrows it speeds up and gets wild. Since he wasn't worried, I wasn't either.

I made sure I found out his beverage of choice and found that rum was a good one. I found a seller and bought him the same cask of the same brand as I had the Captain. Due to market fluctuations I paid about $3.00 less in San Francisco than I had in New York. He said last week the rum was $50 a cask, but a ship arrived full of the stuff and the price went way down. He speculated that the rice shipment we had seen would drop the price of rice as well. He had bought a sack while we were at the ship, I forgot to mention earlier. Rice was a staple in his diet and Cajun cooking in general.

To illustrate his point we took a little tour of the commerce centers of the city, including open air markets, and dockside. He showed me a street full of stoves, well just the tops of them. They were a bit hazardous, since the circular plates were gone leaving a hole in the top, so you watched where you stepped. It seems the market dropped out of stoves one week and the city got them for just hauling them off and sunk them to their tops in a former mud mire, which now was a street. He then topped it off saying the stoves were stacked 2 high! It was a unique situation to San Francisco.

One cartoon out of a daily newspaper that Alvin showed me had a cowboy up to his neck in a mud filled mire yelling for help. As he was pulled up he said that he was much obliged and the fellow on whose shoulders he was standing as well! And he allowed as well that if his horse could talk, he would be thankful as well, since he was standing on the animal's back at that moment. Alvin kept these 'knee slappers' in the first newspaper archive I had consciously encountered. He said that this cartoon was probably why they fixed the street.

Alvin Werte had a serious side, too. On one rare occasion he gave me some advice about Gold Fever that I did not heed at first, but in retrospect proved altogether too true. The miners made less money than the people who provided goods and services for them. The few who did make it spent their money wildly. He said he was cured of it, and decided his most recent trip had been his last, when a group from a foreign land had chartered his littlest raft to get them up to a client near the gold fields. They absolutely would not wait for the bigger craft. At some risk to life and limb he made the voyage. He had cleared after expenses in eight days more than he made in six months of hard rock mining and sluicing on a gold field riverbank. These jolly fellows from England were hauling furniture to a fellow who had 'struck a vein'. I later determined this translated to 'found a lot of gold', as in a 'vein of ore' rather than its use as mostly a medical term. He said once they got there, they got the fever as well and abandoned their profitable business in pursuit of the California treasure.

So I had about a week to see the sights, and a place to sleep and eat far preferable and much more affordable than any hotel or what passed for one at the time. Since my host would not take a penny in payment, saying he enjoyed my company and the rum I gave him; that sealed it for me. I did read a little Shakespeare to him.

Alvin was a literate fellow but a bit lowbrow in his taste in reading matter. Newspapers and cartoons his forte. Simply being able to read gave him a strong advantage in his trade, and make no mistake he did not lack in that old commodity 'horse sense', despite his casual manner and hayseed method of attire.

He did like to drink, sharing a bit of home brewed corn liquor that can best be described as rolling your socks up and down when you take a drink of it, and I truly mean this without exageration (sic). It made the peach brandy taste like ambrosia in comparison. It was no wonder he liked the rum so much. He used it to cut the corn liquor and increase his supply.

We on the farm have had our share of this type of thing, it being a way to get your corn to market, particularly in a 'dry' state. This colorless liquid has opened up many doors for some, about as many as it has closed for others.

We did have a rather celebratory Saturday night after a public hanging of a horse thief, which many attended, including us. There was no public betting, but they were merely satisfying the court in rendering punishment, and it was a pretty cut and dried affair with no reprieve as it turned out.

I told Alvin about the affair on shipboard, which he greeted with an uncharacteristic silence, almost as if he was trying to avoid the topic. It was just a moment, but it caused me to cut short the tale of the trial that I was sure would amuse him greatly. He would only say he would like to talk to me about it all later, which we did when we were finally on our way up the Sacramento. I'm going to tell the story here because otherwise I'll probably forget to include it and you'll forever wonder what he had to say about it.

I have been sworn to an honorable secrecy about this topic and will only divulge the truth of the matter in this memoir, since it is intended for publication after I pass into the great 'bourne, from whom no traveler returns.' I think that's about the quote. Briefly we skip ahead to a riverbank along the Sacramento. We are sitting by a fire made for the occasion, Alvin, myself and Alvin's twin brother, Albert, whom you haven't met as yet. Since he is asleep at the time, and 'sawing wood' with a great snort punctuating a death rattle snore, you won't have to meet him until we actually do encounter him in the course of my story.

I had the grace not to bring it up until he was ready for me to tell it. I knew since he had acknowledged it that he would discuss it with me in due course. I did not want to sour our friendship, which by now I valued greatly, sensing a kindred spirit of sorts and a 'hail fellow well met'.

He mentioned as he smoked his nightly pipe, that he recollected a tale I was to tell him about a trial on shipboard, and was certainly ready to hear it in full detail. Well I was much relieved that he seemed to be truly receptive to the tale. He laughed uproariously in certain spots, and I naturally warmed to the tale, remembering bits of it that I don't remember now to this day, and thoroughly describing the event in an entertaining way.

When I was done, he changed the subject, I thought at first, but it related to my story in a real way. This was one of those dark, moonless nights with a few stars appearing, a hoot owl off in the grass somewhere. It was ripe for a mysterious tale or something scary, surely. Alvin talked about Voodoo, a religion that involved curses and dire consequences for those that broke oaths administered in the celebration of that religion.

He was about to swear me to secrecy under the tenets of this faith, a great and terrible secret that he had been sworn not to tell. He had made a charm to protect himself, but he could only pass the information on under a similar oath. My mind leaped to terrible murders and possibilities of a darker side to this individual. I frankly did not know what to make of it. But I am good at keeping a secret, so I decided it was the night to swear under the penalty of an evil curse, if there could be an ideal night for it. Until this writing I have not talked of this to any soul living or dead. He had me spit into a rag and them wadded it up and tossed it into the flame. It burst into flame and was caught up in an ember and went up to the heavens suddenly. This convinced me that I would not be swearing lightly, and the gravity of it all.

This seemed to satisfy him, and he began speaking. He told me that the trial was a completely staged affair designed to create a gambling pool and profit by it. It was an elaborate charade that unsuspecting passengers were purposely roped into, such as Rev. Anderson. The 'Lawyers' were hired for that purpose for a small fee and free passage. The cheat was either one of two men, and since it was Georgia that we dropped him, he speculated that the island was one of those that had substance after high tide, and that the guilty man was a fellow who had his home there and was merely being dropped off.

This was one of 'Old Johnny's' favorite things to do as a money making enterprise, which is why he insisted on being the judge and kept tight controls on the trial and had no jury. Once he had allowed a jury and they declared a felon guilty and he had actually been hung. This is why Alvin no longer worked for the Captain, that and it was time to move on anyway. Before leaving the Captain made him swear under the Voodoo curse. The one thing that Alvin feared more than that curse was the Devil himself. The Captain was a genial enough fellow, but he thought much of the hard case, which was why Alvin avoided him in San Francisco. He was heartened to hear about the Captain's avoidance of a jury and thought he sensed a regret there that Alvin was not aware of at the time of the incident.

I personally do not find offense or feel the least bit victimized, since I won $17 dollars for my $1 investment. I was entertained for my money. Those that were fleeced would have been fleeced anyway. At least this, though a fixed affair, was fun and basically harmless. But I have kept my oath made by the fire these 40 years with some probity!

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