In one morning, they fixed their packs to the jenny mule and went in search for a more likely site, and in three days, they found the same. First pan of river, they dredged up two nuggets big as sunflower seeds. Against the bright sun, Jams held them up between his finger and thumb and proclaimed to her, “Girl, our future is made.” Out of that hole, they dug in three months to the value of $20,000 and only quit it by hiring a Chinee and his brother to continue work and split the leavings. They was two yalla men by name of Lee who had twelve words of English between them, but honester than two monks, bringing each day’s labor back to the little house Jams had built not far off for an accounting. He was content with the takings and ready to quit off, live the life of luxury, maybe head back to Kentucky and run a few horses, but she would not let him. “We have our nut,” she said, “and from the tiny acorn the mighty oak doth grow. We have to plant that seed, invest our money, watch it grow.”
Though she herself had long left the fields, Flo kept her eye on the miners in the surrounding valley and kept her ears open for the latest chatter in the town. When sluices were introduced, she hired a carpenter and had built at a second claim up north a more elaborate system for separating mud and water from the gold. The money poured in faster than they could count it, and with each new way of mining, the rate of flow only increased. If sluices watered their bank accounts, water cannons blasted away whole hillsides with mother lodes a-hiding. They made canyons out of hillsides, valleys out of plains. Jams hired ten more Chinamen to run three more claims and then secured a man named Murphy, out of New South Wales, Australia, to collect the profits from every Lee and make sure they would not cheat, and each of the claims proved true and more land was staked, more Chinee and Americans, too, redmen and the blacks, to come work for James Worth, and it seemed to never stop. Murphy hisself hired two more men to do the job he once held, and in time, fifty-seven in all mined sixteen claims in the hills of California and wasn’t every damn one of them a moneymaker. Flo hired a girl to write letters for her and to read aloud the replies, and she sent back enough money to Harlan County so that her mam and pap had nary a care and ever last sister and brother and Jamie’s family besides, so much so that his youngest brother Eben, who was but a tadpole when they left, hopped the western highway and took over for Murphy, who had earned enough so’s not to work another day of his life, and he didn’t. ’Stead he sailed back to his wife—the kangaroo—for all Flo cared.
They built themselves a house, a mansion really, in San Francisco after the fires of ’51, and went there to retire from the fields when work was too much with them. Perched atop a hill, they could look out into the Pacific, and from their rocking chairs count the masts of the tall ships abandoned in the harbor, captains, crews, and passengers all lit out for the fields with not a care for their boats. Evening times, they’d feel the fog creep in, so’s that sometimes only the tips of the spars and crow’s nests could be seen, like a fairyland forest.
Ever since she was a girl Flo had dreamt of such a palace, two stories high, and eight rooms in all, furnished in the finest shipped from New York and Boston and London. Because of the fire, Jams insisted on building in brick, and for a time, the red house stood out amid the general rubble, but one thing about Californians, they is quick to build what’s been razed and try again, for they is the luck-seekingest people on the earth. In no time, a new San Francisco stood, better’n the last. When the babies started coming, Flo contented herself with life in the city while Jams managed the land and holdings and brought home more gold dust from the Chinee every few weeks. They named the first child Jessie, after Mrs. Frémont, and their boy John C. arrived in the same year that Mr. Frémont became the first nominee of the Republicans for the President of the United States at the convention way off in Philadelphia. It was a time to be proud of who ye were, and they were Californians by now and had washed Kentucky clean out their pans.