Chapter 222: Sitting in the Counting House

Editor: nnpdad

Paperwork was the bane of civilization everywhere and everywhen. That morning, I was having trouble focusing for whatever reason. Some days I just couldn’t bend my focus onto the piles of paper in front of me. It didn’t help that more and more of the reports I was seeing were handwritten; it was bad enough when everything was neat and tidy on bright white paper or screen with fonts chosen for clarity. Now it was off-white mostly parchment paper with hand written script; some of it neat and tidy like Sonya’s, others not so much. It ran the gamut from small and tight to loopy and lovely, the most annoying was the chicken scratch that Timmons or Sheriff wrote up. Those fellas were bad to start with, but if they were hurried or tired it was nigh on unreadable.

The more I stared at the charts of postal rates and freight fees per pound, the more frustrated I got. I was definitely getting someone to go with me the rest of the trip, probably Sonya as she’d been pestering me to see the ‘city’ of St. Louis for a while. Michelle was less interested at this point, she was busy setting up her own little life and nesting like any expectant mother. Matilda just flat out wasn’t interested. Aside from the non-interest she was also hugely pregnant and getting ready to pop. She was already starting to waddle a little bit as she wandered around the camp; a blessing with her though was that she never complained. Zip in the complaints department from tough little Matilda, that didn’t surprise me though – she’d probably go through the entire labor process with only a yawn and a sigh.

So Sonya was it. We needed to get all of our subsidiaries doing their bookkeeping the same way, so taking her along made sense. Even if it might extend the overall trip by a day or two it would be worth it to get a handle on the bookkeeping before things got too far out of control. I thought about going up to discuss the idea with Sven but decided that I had one more task left. I needed to sort and count my money.

I knew how much I owed Henry Leavenworth but I wanted to sort it out by currency type: bank drafts, coin and gold, of course. I was supposed to be exercising our first deal a little further and sell him more gold at the elevated price but if I could pay for anything else with bank drafts I’d be a lot happier. I preferred to build up the currency in townfolks’ hands to prime our economic pump a little further.

So as we chugged upriver I spent the better part of the next hour carefully sorting, counting, stacking and bagging each type of currency. Each bag of gold had to contain exactly one pound: whether it be dust, nuggets, or coin, it shouldn’t be mixed. I did have a few odds and ends that I bagged separately and just strove to remember what they were.

I was taking twenty pounds of gold with me to exchange for greenbacks. That should give me a sizeable chunk of capital to work with when spring arrived. I hoped to get down to New Orleans come spring and make some major purchases, namely more steam engines and lots of steel stock. Our smelting process was slow and it was far more expedient just to purchase the steel we needed. The other thing we needed a lot of was tools - any type of hand tool or farm tool I could get my hands on.