Chapter 10

In fact, Frederick Urban had been somewhat frail during his childhood in Chicago. He was the third of five children of a father who had been widowed when Fred was five. Levi Urban worked as a tailor for a haberdashery, but he found it necessary to take on extra work to provide for his family’s mere subsistence. Even so, Urban had what was an above-average education for the day, completing nearly ten years of primary and secondary education as a charity enrollee at a Hebrew school.

At the age of fifteen, he became his father’s apprentice. But though he loved and respected his father, Urban quickly realized he had no interest in making tailoring his career. At eighteen, with only six dollars in his pocket, he left home and worked his way west.

He was a latecomer to California’s Kern River goldfields. Against the odds, he hit pay dirt on a tributary creek, though not a bonanza. It was the second of two claims he had filed. But even the few dollars earned from that claim made him feel flush and fostered his determination to set aside pick and shovel and to expand his interests. His inexperience cost him dearly, however: he lost his money on a swindle involving a salted claim. Desperate, without funds or food, he signed on to a crew preparing the right-of-way for the Central Pacific Railroad.

The western division of the first transcontinental rail line to span the North American continent, the Central Pacific, in 1863, had begun laying track at Sacramento and thence east, into the Sierra Nevada.

When Urban joined up, the way crew had already crossed Yuba Pass and was pushing toward Soda Springs, as they strove for Donner Pass. Urban worked even harder than he had on his own claims along the Kern. Despite the use of black powder explosives, the bulk of the work was still with axe and saw, pick and shovel, cutting and dragging through forests, digging through hills and ridges, filling in gullies and washes, all by human muscle and mule power.

Urban had become friends with another worker from the way gang, “Pickax Pete” Pottinger. Both were intelligent and ambitious young men who shared a sense of humor and an open-minded approach to life.

One afternoon, the foreman had sent the two of them to fill the gang’s canteens at the south fork of the Yuba River, which flowed nearby. The two men made their way downhill, through a strip of evergreen forest, and into a brushy meadow. Pottinger was in the lead, bulling his way toward the river through a tangle of low-growing gooseberry bramble, when all of a sudden he gave a yelp and disappeared from sight.

Urban moved quickly, but cautiously, to the spot where Pottinger had vanished. As he approached, he could hear faintly, then more clearly, Pickax Pete shouting curses and profanities, though the exact phraseology was lost in the roar of the rapids in the nearby river.

Looking down through a break in the entwined foliage, Urban saw Pottinger, about twelve feet below, sitting chest-deep in a fast-moving creek in a narrow, shadowy defile. It had been completely hidden from view by the over-growing bushes, with the noise of its own rushing progress masked by the ambient sounds of the river into which the creek discharged.

Urban called down, over the noise of the creek, and, once he had determined that his friend had not been seriously injured, he suggested that Pottinger move either upstream or down until he found a place he could climb out. Pickax Pete peered downstream, then up, at which point he looked at Urban and pointed upstream. Thence he started out, climbing out of the pool in which he had landed and over and among the boulders that littered the small stream’s course. He was quickly lost to view under the cover of the overhanging gooseberry shrubs.

Urban pushed his way out of the thorny undergrowth and moved about seventy yards upslope to a small clearing that gave him a narrow access to the ravine. Or so he thought.

When he reached the spot at which he expected to intersect the stream, all he found was jumbled rock. He looked toward where he knew the stream must be and his gaze was just in time to see Pete rising among the gooseberry bushes, like a haunt rising from the grave.

“What the hell, Pete? What happened to the crick?”

“It must be flowing below these rocks. I came to a place where the ravine was full of rocks, so I just climbed out.” Pottinger stood there, dripping wet, with a foolish grin on his face

Shaking his head, Urban asked, “So, did you fill the canteens while you were down there?”

Pottinger lifted one of the canteens in front of Urban. It was crushed nearly flat.

“I landed on this tin ‘un, I reckon. These here wood cans came through, but they still need fillin’. Yours, too, but I’d say let’s not do it that way, again. We’ll head straight over to the river there. But first lemme get the creek bottom out ‘a my trouser cuffs.”

Urban accepted the canteens from Pottinger, while that man bent over and unrolled his cuffs to clean out the wet sand and gravel that had collected. As Pottinger bent to his task, accompanied by an ongoing string of half-hearted profanity, Urban’s eye had been caught by some lustrous yellow bits on the carrying rope attached to the crushed canteen. He brought the rope closer to his eye -- and realized he was looking at tiny gold flakes.

At the same moment, Pottinger, still leaning over, digging creek sand from his cuffs said, “What the hell?” and stood up quickly, looking at some gritty residue on the spread fingers of his right hand.

The men looked at each other, and each held out what they’d found in front of the other’s face.

Seeing the tiny golden grains on Pottinger’s fingers, Urban said, slowly and quietly, “Son of a bitch.”

Abruptly, both of them spun around, looking in all directions. But there was no one in sight, no one who might have observed their actions.

Then the two men turned to one another, their faces only inches apart. They were both experienced prospectors and they knew immediately what they’d chanced upon.

“We need to keep this quiet,” Urban whispered, urgently.

“This might be railroad property,” Pottinger despaired.

Urban said, “Ah, maybe here, but a few dozen yards that direction, it ain’t.” He pointed to where the buried stream likely originated, on a steeper slope in the nearby forest. “The vein’s got ‘a be higher up.”

“This whole area’s been dug up and washed out. How’d they ever miss this creek?”

“Same way we did, I reckon. If we’d been sensible and walked ‘round the berry thicket ‘over this-a-way, and if you’d been watchin’ your footin’ an’ not fallen in, we still wouldn’t know it’s there.”

“Yeah. Maybe so. When I was down in there and looked downstream, toward the river, all I could see was a pile a’ boulders. Might even be its joinin’ to the river is hid among them big rocks.”

Urban said, “We need to get back. Let’s fill these cans. We’ll talk later, after supper. Let’s take the checkerboard off by ourselves. We’ll talk then.”

“What about Arnie? He ought ‘a be in on this.”

“An’ that’s fine by me, just don’t tell him yet, not ‘til we got a plan.”

Their greater concern was the possibility that someone else might find the hidden creek. Roadbed crews and track-laying crews would be following along over the next several weeks; someone from those work gangs might also stumble upon the stream. They needed that no one else should notice the creek until they could save a grubstake from their pay.

Day by day, as the right-of-way advanced, they dreaded hearing the news that some thirsty workman coming up the mountain behind them had struck it rich. Meanwhile, the Central Pacific continued to claw its way toward the top of the Sierras.

As the weeks advanced, more Chinese laborers were being hired. Not surprisingly, they were being assigned the grubbier and riskier jobs of the right-of-way work: hanging over cliffs to drill charge holes for blasting, working the areas prone to slides, mucking out the blast debris from tunnels of untested stability. The Chinese were considered sub-human ciphers to be expended without regard. With the shift in labor assignments, more of the white workers were transferred to the road bed and track-laying gangs. Now the increase in the number of workers only added to the partners’ fears.

As it happened, though, no one from any of the railroad construction crews found the hidden stream with its tiny nuggets and flakes. But someone else did.

Two months after their discovery, Urban, Pottinger, and Arnie Yeats, now working with the track-laying crew, were twenty-six arduous mountain miles beyond the shrouded brook. After a final, quiet discussion over their checkerboard, they told the foreman they’d decided to quit their jobs and head for San Francisco.

Arnold Yeats had been a boyhood friend of Pottinger, whom Pete hadn’t seen since both of them were fourteen, the year that Pottinger’s family had emigrated from western Kentucky to central Missouri. Then, by wildest chance, the two met again when they registered side-by-side mining claims near Virginia City, Nevada. The friendship was renewed, but their mining claims proved near-worthless. Destitute, both men decided to stick together, and they hired on with a construction gang building the Central Pacific Railroad.

The three partners rode on an open flatcar to Sacramento, over the railroad they had helped build. They had saved enough of their pay to purchase a pack mule and sufficient mining tools, food supplies, and at least one firearm each, resulting in a mix of one shotgun and two revolvers between them. They loaded the mule and they walked back into the mountains.

Chen Ming-teh (in the Chinese tradition, one’s surname is placed before one’s given name) was from Guangxi, a province on China’s southern border. Already a successful businessman at a young age, in 1854 he became a major financier for the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, later to be referred to as the Taiping Rebellion. That insurgency had been ignited four years earlier by Hong Xiuquan, a charismatic, self-aggrandizing, Christian cultist. Hong had assembled an army in the Taiping Prefecture and set out to contest the rule of China’s Manchu-led Qing dynasty.

Chen Ming-teh, as with many others, had been attracted to the social reforms espoused in the Heavenly Kingdom. Despite Hong Xiuquan’s off-putting religious pretensions, his rabid anti-Confucianism, and his active opposition to Buddhist traditions, he held a profound appeal for both the peasant farmers and the common laborers that populated China. This appeal was demonstrated in a civil war which eventually stretched to fourteen years of bloody fighting that swept across southern China. In the end, the internecine strife left perhaps as many as one hundred million dead, in what was certainly the bloodiest conflict in China’s history.

Chen, however, spent most of those war years abroad, securing sales and purchasing contracts, and recruiting investors to the upstart Heavenly Kingdom. Not just a brilliant money manager, Chen knew people, too, and he was a master at trade-craft.

Primarily, his success was due to his early realization that the best transactions were those that worked to everyone’s benefit. Otherwise, any deal that resulted in one side “winning” and the other side “losing” meant that the so-called winner had likely lost either a future trading partner or a repeat customer. In the trade game, Chen realized, unless everyone won, everyone lost.

Of further advantage to his success in international trade, Chen had a remarkable facility in languages. He could both speak and write the languages of China’s foremost trading partners, the English, Dutch, and Portuguese. In Chinese dialects, besides his own native Putonghua, known in the west as Mandarin, he was also fully fluent in two other major Chinese variants, Yue and Wu. In his travels, he had acquired further conversational capability in German, Italian, Spanish, and French, and, while not facile, he had also mastered a number of useful phrases in a few African and Middle Eastern languages, as well as in several other Asian tongues.

Notably, Chen was a Christian, as were many of those involved in the Heavenly Kingdom’s cause. Chen’s parents had been converts to the Roman church and he was the product of a Jesuit tertiary education.

Unfortunately for Chen’s purposes, the Heavenly Kingdom rebellion finally met defeat in 1864.

For much of that year, Chen had been in America, particularly in the far west, the source of much of the gold and silver fueling the Union’s war machine in America’s own civil conflict. While that war dragged on in the east, Chen found that garnering investments had become more difficult, as munitions production and military procurement in the American war had drawn opportunistic investors like moths to a flame.

In the aftermath of the demise of the Heavenly Kingdom, Chen’s immediate concern was that it brought a sea change in Sino-political ascendancy, not only in China, but in every Chinese expatriate community throughout the world. Of an instant, Chen’s status had fallen from commercial diplomat to political refugee, even sub-human, in the eyes of many white Americans. Moreover, his faction’s failure guaranteed him a painful death, should he return to China. It also made him persona non grata among northern California’s growing Chinese immigrant population, which was controlled mostly by Manchu loyalists.

Chen learned of the rebellion’s collapse from the latest edition of a San Francisco newspaper as he was returning there from Sacramento by steamboat. By the time Chen reached his rented house in San Francisco’s China Town, it had been stripped of everything of value, including his clothing and personal items, even his servants and his concubine. Now he was left with only the clothes on his back and the not quite sixty dollars in American gold and silver coins that he had been carrying on his business trip.

He realized he had little choice but to leave San Francisco, to remove himself from the unsubtle strictures of that city’s insular Chinese community. Even then, it was likely his life was already forfeit, possibly with a price on his head.

Moving cautiously back to the docks, dressed as a common Chinese laborer, a “coolie” in the common parlance, he slipped aboard the Oakland ferry. Once across the Bay he did not linger, but walked through Oakland while it was still dark. By the following evening, he had disappeared into the lowlands and marshes of the Sacramento River delta.