The reason I took up with Charley, to the extent of buying him drinks with Estrellita’s hard-earned money, was my natural weakness for people with a positive vision. He might have been a penniless old drunk, but there wasn’t any getting away from it that he talked an excellent idea. After prospecting for fifty years, he claimed to have located the biggest lode of gold in the “organized world” (which is how he referred to it, for Charley always talked mighty grandiose), and just at that point the Ute stole his pack animals, to which was lashed all his tools, and trailing them he got lost in the desert without water, lost his mind for a time, wore out his boots, and walked all the way to Taos in his bare feet. In spite of these “horrendous misadventures,” he remembered exactly where that gold was: in a region of Colorado between the Arkansas River and the South Platte.
Charley would take a sip of liquor, roll it around in his toothless mouth, swallow with his whiskers aflutter, and say: “If I had your pecuniary endowments, sonny, I’d buy a set of possibles and ram-bunculate northwards, coming back within six months as a man of means beyond the dreams of algebra.” That is near as I can come to his style, and you must also realize that all the
Then one day word reached Santa Fe that gold had been struck on Cherry Creek in Colorado, right in that area what Charley always talked about. From a bum he turned into quite a hero. He could have drunk free on it for some time, and immediately got all kinds of offers to head the expeditions that started to outfit at once. But soon as he was vindicated, Charley become uppity. “Go pound sand up the aperation of your hindquarters,” he told them others. “It was Shunny here who give me refreshment, and it be him I’ll make rich.”
It wasn’t until well into the fall of ’58 that we got to Colorado after a wearing trip, for on the way we was raided by Apache and I took an arrow in my leg, fell down, and knocked myself out. When I come to, our horses and mules was gone and the cantina owner’s cousins as well. “They go under?” I asked old Charley, who appeared all right himself, just setting there rubbing his toothless gums with a finger while his rheumy eyes was fixed on the horizon.
“Oh,” says he, “I had to deliver them over to the Apache. It didn’t enthrall me with pleasure to do it, but you and me would never reach the gold if I hadn’t.”
Like most of the border Indians, the Apache had a peculiar grudge against Mexicans. So as to be able to kill the three cousins in some excruciating manner, they had let me and Charley go. He was a treacherous old goat, I think you will agree. And while I should maybe have thanked him, the result was I got very little sleep thereafter, for now we had nobody extra to give away if the need occurred but me. And I was wounded, not serious but for a time I couldn’t do no running.
We did not encounter any more Indians, but our gear was gone now and our guns, so all we could bring down in the way of game was rattlesnake, by club, which however wasn’t the worst victual in the world providing you could knock it dead without prejudicing yourself.
Charley was supposed to know the territory, but had forgot it owing to his years of drinking. His memory could have come back, he said, with a drink of spirits, but we didn’t have none of course. I myself would have settled for a drink of muddy water by the time we was wandering hopelessly in the Great Sand Dune area of southern Colorado. We would sure have died there had not that party trailing us come to our rescue.
You must have got the point by now: Charley was the world’s worst prospector. He just didn’t know his profession. That was a revelation to me. I had thought if a fellow practiced a trade, he would naturally be good at it. But that ain’t true. He can be awful at it all his life.
In our condition at the time they found us, we couldn’t very well refuse to let that party throw in with us, and we at last arrived at Cherry Creek just as winter set in. The rest of the world had got there before us, owing to newspaper accounts all across the country. There was about eighty cabins already built, and in case you don’t know it that was the start of Denver, Colorado, though they called it Auraria for the first couple years.
