Week 4 Response



I came up for the gold you see. In ’49 they discovered it in the Sierra Nevadas. Before folks had heard about gold a little while after they discovered it. In ’49 they had telegrams so BANG, we knew. I was a miner in Sonora and knew what I was doing. I’d been working in the mines most days since I was small. It was hard to tell whether they were telling the truth about the gold finds up in the Sierras, but I had to find out for myself so I decided to take off. I didn’t have much of anything holding me down. I was still young enough to go on an adventure. I made my way up across the border, not that it was much of a border at that stage or any stage when I was alive, and into California. I got there a little earlier than most folks I suppose and started looking. California had plenty of my people in at that time and plenty of Indians too. We had set up camp in the mountains already, when the white men started coming. By the thousands, then the tens of thousands. Soon I was getting kicked off my claim. Just like that. Dozens of white men with torches and rifles. They had plenty of camaraderie for each other, but whenever something went wrong in the camps they lynched one of us. Pure terror tactics. I wanted gold as much as the next man, but I wasn’t dumb enough to stick around. I headed back down South about a year later. Pity is there was enough gold to go around. It was a real gold rush out in California. Started that place off as the land of milk and honey. You know paradise. Except not for everybody. See I was there at the jump and the fact that you had to slink back across that border however many decades later and live out on the edges of the cities they built with what should have been my gold. Maybe I should’ve stayed.  

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