(Jon and Pa Kettering have briefly returned from Coloma and building Mr. Sutter’s new sawmill.)

We reached the cabin where we lived then, early in the afternoon. It was a mild day, just a scattering of clouds floating in a blue sky. You might have thought it a fine day to start on the spring plowing, with all the grass coming up green through last year’s dead tufts, but it was still winter. Ma had started digging up the vegetable patch on the sunny south side of the cabin. Pa and Henry had built a zig-zag pole fence to keep the cattle out – and there were already thready green sprouts on some of the rows. There was smoke coming from the chimney, and clean laundry flapping on the clothesline.  Ma herself was pegging out clothes to it, with two clothespins in her mouth, which she dropped the moment that she saw us.

“Sakes alive, Elkanah!” she cried, and ran towards us. “Johnny-cakes! What has happened – is the mill finished? Did Captain Sutter pay you – oh, he had better have paid you!”

“Easy, Sue,” Pa replied. He swung down off his horse and took Ma in his arms. “We can only stay for a day or so. Mr. Marshall had a serious matter to discuss with the Captain and he asked me to come along with him.”

Inside I heard a baby crying, a sudden and very shrill cry, as Boomer the hound suddenly erupted from the door, and ran up to me. Boomer had been our family dog since I was a lap-baby myself. Now he was starting to go grey around the muzzle although he was carrying on as if he was still a pup. He capered around me as I dismounted from Kanzas the pony, leaping up to lick at my hands and face – silly old dog! My mother pulled away from Pa’s arms as my sister Sally appeared in the cabin door, holding a howling baby. Sally held Emily-Anne to her shoulder, patting her on the back and trying to shush the baby to silence. My sister Sally was then the age of 14, and thought very pretty, but as there were hardly any American girls of marriageable age at that time in California, she had not much competition in that respect. Sally had dark hair with a streak of auburn-red in it like Pa’s and a heart-shaped face with strong dark brows slashed across it. My sister also had no patience with foolishness, which was why she had already turned down several offers of marriage from men afire with impatience to marry.

Sally’s gaze fell on me, and she exclaimed, “Johnny-cakes! Is the work at the mill done? Where is Henry?” Her eyes went looking beyond, and when she looked back at me, they were accusing. “Why are you riding Kanzas!? Has something happened to Henry?”

“No, Sugar-plum, Henry is fine,” Pa soothed her. “He stayed at the mill – he had work to do there, now that the machinery is in place.”

“What’s the matter with Emmy!” Ma demanded, for Emily-Anne was barely soothed, still sobbing and red-faced. Ma took the baby into her own arms, as Sally said,

“She was sleeping in her basket by the fire, and Boomer was sleeping next to her, when suddenly Boomer leaped up and jostled the basket when he leaped over it. He heard Pa and Jon’s horses outside … and you know how much that dog adores Jonny-cakes.”

Boomer was still capering around my feet, nudging me with his nose, as I led Kanzas to the stable, took off the saddle and horse blanket and rubbed him down. I had to pet him often, just to get a chance to take care of Henry’s pony, and he wiggled with happiness as dogs do, with his whole body.

“Looks like the old boy missed you, something awful,” Pa observed, as he took the same care of his horse.

“Guess he did,” I answered, feeling somewhat guilty, because I hadn’t given much thought to Old Boomer in the time that we had been away. When I did think about him, I just assumed that he, like Ma and Sally, were all taken up with the baby, Emily-Anne.

Ma fixed dinner for us – a cut of beef stewed with a few carrots and potatoes, the carrots tough and stringy, the potatoes half-gone through having been saved over from fall. The beef was good, though. In California then, beef was so common that folk commonly purchased a whole beef, rather than just a roast or chops. She was apologizing over and over for how she would have made something special for Pa and I, if she had known we were coming down from the hills. Boomer lay under my chair, poking his nose into my lap at every opportunity. Pa did not say anything about gold, or the errand with Mr. Marshall, although I expect that he told Ma about it, when they were in bed together, later that night. We talked at the supper table about the mill, gossip among the workers about the doings of the Mormon leader, Brigham Young, in establishing a new colony in the Utah desert, and how California had yet another military governor, a Colonel Mason, who was reported to be very tall, affable and much more reasonable a man than anyone thought an Army officer could be.

Sally followed me when I went out just before sundown, making certain  that Kanzas and Pa’s horse were safely stabled away for the night.  The cold seeped out, after the sun went down. In the morning, I thought we would see frost on the grass, even though we were just around the corner from spring.

“What of Henry?” she demanded, as soon as I closed the slatted stable door and let the latch fall. “Did he ever say my name, or ask after me, all the time that you were in the hills? Why didn’t he come with you and Pa?”

I wracked my memory and honestly couldn’t recall if Henry had. I thought I had better be tactful, though. “I suppose that he did, now and again. He missed yours and Ma’s cooking. ‘Specially Ma’s bread. With fresh-churned butter on it. I reckon we all missed home, but we didn’t dwell on it, much.”

Sally’s face fell – she looked so disappointed that I felt sorry. For all that I knew, Henry had thought about her, but since I couldn’t see into his mind … to make her feel better, I added, “He was awful busy, Sally – we all were. The millrace wasn’t dug deep enough to turn the wheel proper at first, so it had to be dug out again. The job isn’t more than three-fourths done.” Sally looked at me, really sharp. I’ve never been good at telling lies, which Reverend Grandpa Kettering back in Ohio would have called the worst kind of sin. And Sally was always real good at picking apart those lies when I tried to tell her one. “I’m not fibbing, Sally – we really were busy, all of us.”

“Funny that you and Pa and Mr. Marshall should come away, with the mill not finished,” she observed. “Why might that be, Johnny-cakes? Don’t even think of spinning a yarn to me. I want to know.”

“Pa said that I wasn’t to tell,” I protested, but I knew in my heart that I couldn’t avoid telling Sally. After all, Pa was probably going to tell Ma. “But it’s a secret. We weren’t suppose to spill on it to anyone, until Mr. Marshall or Captain Sutter said. You have to promise, or all of us will get into terrible trouble. Promise you’ll keep it a secret.”

“If I even believe it in the first place,” Sally replied. She folded her arms. I hoped that Ma would call us into the house soon as it was already dark, but no such luck. “Well?”

“Mr. Marshall found gold in the millrace,” I whispered. “It’s true – I saw it. Two pebbles of gold and a bunch of little flakes. Mrs. Wimmer boiled one of the pebbles in her soap kettle for a day, and it came out bright and shiny. So Mr. Marshall said that Captain Sutter would have to be told, and he wanted Pa to come along as a witness when he showed Captain Sutter the gold that he found. Henry needed to stay because of the mill …”

“I see,” my sister mused. She had a look on her face as if she were thinking. “Gold in the… for certain?”

“Mrs. Wimmer was,” I replied. “And she grew up near to where there was gold in the rivers in Georgia when she was a girl.”

“I wonder if there’s a lot, in the rivers up there, in the mountains?” Sally still had that thinking expression. “When we were traveling along the Yuba, coming down from the mountains, I thought that some of the river sand glittered. As if it was gold. If you found a lot of gold, you’d be rich. Pa would be rich enough to buy the land that he wants. A fancy house for Ma, like Captain Sutters. With a garden, all around. If he found a lot of gold, Henry could buy all the books from the East that he wants to study.” Her look at me sharpened. “If you found a lot of gold, you could buy all the ponies you want, and never have to go to school. What else would you buy, if you found a great lump of gold, Johnny-cakes?”

I thought hard. “I don’t know, rightly. Something pretty for Ma, I reckon. A ginger kitten with white paws for you, mebbe. A proper good saddle for Kanzas. I don’t know, Sally.”

“Silly Johnny-cakes!” Sally laughed, and all of a sudden, she hugged me to her and kissed my forehead. “All for other people, nothing for yourself. You’re a good and selfless brother! I reckon Reverend Grandfather would approve! It’s cold outside – let’s go in. All the same,” she added, as she laid a hand on the door latch. “Do look for more gold, when you go back to Coloma. It just might turn out to be useful. At the very least, you can have a goldsmith make a pretty ring or a pin for Ma out of it.”

So, after nearly four years of being sidelined from matters literary because of Covid, and then by helping to raise Wee Jamie, the Wonder Grandson, I am making plans for doing events at some local bookstores this year for West Towards the Sunset, and to send that book in for the Giddings World Wrangler. The yearly Giddings event was canceled because of Covid once – maybe twice, and then the book that I sent in last time wasn’t picked. Anyway, I will try again, because we absolutely loved going to Giddings and adored how much everyone in that community and school system turned out in support of Texas authors.

It wasn’t just the covid epidemic and everyone going into a panic over it. I suspect that the association for Texas authors which I was active in for a good few years and which set up a great many events for authors is also collapsing. I blame exhaustion on the part of the organizers, assisted by a good push from the covid lockdowns and the downturn in the economy for the last few years. All that, and perhaps a lack of energy on my part.

Anyway, I am looking at doing something in May or early June at the Twig Bookstore here in San Antonio. The Twig has been around for years – I did a very rewarding signing and launch of the Adelsverein Trilogy there, when they were still on Broadway in Alamo Heights, but then they moved to premises at the Pearl Brewery, and a subsequent signing for Daughter of Texas was so disastrous that I wrote off doing anything else there. I think there were maybe two people walking into the store in two hours, both of whom studiously avoided catching my eye. This was way before the Pearl began expansion; now there is a complex of a boutique hotel, a range of condos, apartments and upscale shops. They also host a huge and very popular farmer’s market on Sundays, so I have hopes for a lot of walk-in shoppers. I’ll also walk around in one of my costumes, handing out my cards and flyers, before and after the signing, so perhaps I did learn something from that disastrous signing. Nothing works as well as Attracting Attention to Yourself! And since the Twig emphasizes appealing to children with a wide range of children’s and YA books … West Towards the Sunset works with that aspect of the book trade.

The other bookstore is the Boerne Bookshop, tucked away at the back of a big new building on Main Street in Boerne. It’s a small place, but I did a very rewarding event there for My Dear Cousin. It was rewarding  for them, as well – because not only did copies of that book and some others sell, but my daughter bought a couple of books from off their shelves which took her eye. They have access there to a covered alley in front of their premises, and make space on Boerne Market days for six authors who bring their own tables and either handle their own sales directly, or  have the Boerne Bookshop process sales for a percentage. They are booked solid until past May, but I have asked for the first available date. Again with the period costume and handing out flyers and cards. I only regret that Wee Jamie is not quite old enough to be dressed up in a period knickerbocker suit, a Little Lord Fauntleroy velveteen suit with a lace collar, or a Tom Sawyer outfit and be initiated into the craft of direct sales…

There was a point a couple of years ago, where I got tired of looking up a recipe in one of my vast collections of cookery books and magazines for something we enjoyed and therefore prepared frequently. I made one large book of the most regularly-used and favorite dishes; printed out pages and xerox copies of various pages in plastic protector sheets, all tidied up in a three ring binder. Some of the recipes were culled from various cooking websites and printed directly from their pages, some were ones that I copied, pasted, adjusted the print size, deleting unnecessary text, and saved them to a file on my own computer.

It all made a pretty thick binder, all told – and at some point, the pages wicked up a large quantity of water from off of the countertop. Because most of the pages were inside plastic protector sheets, they stayed damp and began to get moldy, disgustingly smelly, as well as blurring the lettering on many pages. Anyway, this week I started revamping the binder. Because as it is, the single binder had become so large and unwieldy, I plan breaking it into a pair of slightly more wieldy binders. The chicken, beef and soup recipes are all packed into in one, and the fish, vegetarian, salad and miscellaneous side dishes in the second. The desserts, preserves and sauces are already in a third binder of their own.

This necessitates calling up and reprinting those pages, finding the websites or the issues of various magazines and scanning them afresh: a bit of a chore, but it also gives me an opportunity to consider deleting some recipes entirely; something that we made once, and really didn’t like enough to fix again.  And that’s my housekeeping chore for the week … anything to put off working up the income tax return for 2024…

(This will be the follow on book to West Towards the Sunset, with Sally Kettering’s brother Jon as the main character. He is now eight years old, and he, Henry and Pa Kettering are part of the crew building a sawmill on the American River, over the winter of 1847-48.)

The stretch of valley where the mill was to be built was one of those lightly wooded vales, with gentle hills on either side and the ice-cold river winding in gentle bends down the middle between. There were stands of trees – bare sycamores holding up their branches against the cold blue sky, and oaks just shedding the last of their bronze-colored leaves. When we came to that place and set up camp, we saw that Captain Sutter’s surveyor had marked certain large trees with blazes and bits of red rag tied to canes thrust into the soil, Mr. Marshall, with Pa and Mr. Wimmer went to walk along the riverbank, looking for the best site for the mill. The weather was so mild that even though it was coming on to winter, we could still sleep in the open, although Pa set up a tent for us – the wall tent that he and Ma had slept in at night, coming over the trail. Even so, Mr. Marshall told us that it would get cold at night when winter did set in for real. He and Mr. Wimmer commenced planning to build a double cabin – the kind that they called a dog-trot cabin in the South; two rooms on either side, with an open porch in between. Pa thought that we three could get along for the moment with our tent, thick pallet beds stuffed with grass, and every heavy quilt that Ma could send with us.

“When are you going to explain to me how a saw mill works?” I asked Henry, after we finished setting up our camp. Pa and Mr. Marshall had not yet returned from walking the open meadow where the river made a gentle bend, sorting out the best place to start building. They were also marking the trees which would be felled for their timbers, timbers that would be needed for the mill, and to build a cabin for the Wimmers and the Mormon workers.

“I will show you,” Henry replied. He was already whittling out with his fine steel German pocketknife. It looked to me like he was cutting little notches into a rounded piece of wood. “I have studied much – existing diagrams and plans for such. It is in my mind to make a working model. For my amusement and to teach to you.”

When Henry talked of such things to us, he always sounded more stilted; as if he were still thinking in German and putting his thoughts then into English.

“Will it really saw planks?” I demanded, and Henry sent me a sideways smile, as he whittled away.

“It might,” He replied, seriously. “If there is enough force from the water, to work the saw blade. It might not. There is a complicated reason why…”

And he went on explaining it to me, in every detail. It all went into my mind and then trickled right out again – just as Ma’s lessons always did.  I just wasn’t made for book-lessons, not the way that Henry, or my sister Sally was. I had come to that realization in the last year or so; it seemed that Pa had come to the same conclusion.

Oh, it was a rare time, those first weeks in the Coloma valley, setting up to build Captain Sutter’s mill! None of Ma’s lessons that always made my poor head ache as if someone was pounding on it with a hammer! The constant soft splashing of the river, the last few leaves on the nearly-bare trees rustling in the light breeze, and the way that the morning fog left glistening droplets on the branches, which sparkled like diamonds once the sun burned off the fog … But there were chores in plenty – but outdoors, and variable, which was much more to my liking. Holding the hammers and saws for the carpentering crew, bringing them dippers of cold water when they were thirsty, watching them fell and trim trees. Pa let me handle a small hand saw, so that I could help trim smaller branches. Within the first week, a cabin of unpeeled logs Mr. Wimmer’s family, and the workers had been built and nearly completely roofed,

I liked the passel of young men that Mr. Marshall had hired, and Mr. Wimmer supervised as I came to know and work with them. They were  all militia volunteers for the Mexican War and sent out to California as part of the Army – but seeing that they were all devout Mormon, they were well-mannered and clean-living to an unusual degree, having eschewed strong drink, and even the drinking of tea and coffee!  Pa remarked quietly to Henry and I that this put them farther over the edge of the temperance side of conduct than any hard-shell Baptist that he had ever heard of. They were all bound for their new colony of Deseret, when winter was over, and spring thawed snow in the high mountain passes. Brigham Young, who was the chief apostle of the new Saints, as they called themselves, had decreed that they would establish the perfect new city for themselves, out in the howling desert wilderness near the great inland Salt Lake. We had not passed through that desert, but some that we had met in California had – and they said nothing good about the awful desert country. I reckoned myself that it was several degrees awfuler than the desert between the Humbolt Sink and the Truckee. I couldn’t see how any sane body would want to set up housekeeping there, and I said so to Pa when we talked of this.

“Having failed in attempts to build such a perfect communal establishment for themselves in the settled country, Mr. Young has decided that the howling wilderness would be the better choice for his folk.”

“Why would that be?” Henry wondered. We were sitting at our fire, a little apart from where the others were camped in and around the half-built log house. “Were they not agreeable to their neighbors?”

You must recall that Henry Steitler’s pa and ma were foreigners, only come to America a year or so before we set out on the trail to California – so Henry might not have paid much mind to the ruckus that had been raised about Mormons in Missouri and Iowa and other like places.

“No,” Pa replied. “For whatever reasons, good or bad – or Mormons, good or bad – their neighbors were not agreeable to them. I’d guess that Mr. Young has decided that they can only get long with their neighbors – if they have no neighbors.” Pa looked over to where the Mormon lads were laughing and joshing around their own campfire as the sun slid down over the far hills in a blaze of gold and orange glory, sending shadows reaching out across the narrow valley. He sighed a little. “It’s gonna be a hard row their chief apostle has set them to hoe – I wish them all the luck in the world, but I just don’t see how they can make a garden out of a desert that forbidding.”

“You think they will fail at that – their Deseret city?” Henry was fascinated. He recalled our desert crossing as well as any of us.

Pa shook his head. “I don’t see how they can, even with the best will in the world – not on land so hostile to everyone but poor naked Indians, living off crickets and grubs … no, nothing will come of their Deseret.”

I remembered this exchange most particularly – because it was one of the very few times that Pa was wrong.

So, having completed the YA novel about the emigrant trail, I was thinking over how to make it into a series, along the lines of Little House on the Prairie. The trouble is that with my original protagonist, Sally, in West Towards the Sunset, being twelve years old in that book … she would grow up. I wanted to keep the main character of a series as a tween or teen, but still incorporate their participation in all kinds of interesting events over the following twenty years after 1846. And then I had a thought – each YA novel could feature a subsequent tween or teen in the Kettering family, starting with Sally’s brother Jon as a main character … and then with two more siblings!
And that was inspiring – especially since the milieu of the various precious metal rushes would allow more liberty to a male character … so on with the follow-up, featuring Jon Kettering! Then I am plotting taking the younger sister, presently a baby, to Virginia City in the Silver Rush, and the very youngest Kettering boy, as yet unborn, working in a newspaper office with a very young Samuel L. Clemens. Each book, as in the Texas frontier series will be free-standing, but linked. So behold — the first half chapter of Hills of Gold!

(I promise – I am also working on the final wrap-up of the Luna City Chronicles. Yes, I can multi-task…)

It was a small thing, that bright pebble in the millrace – but what an avalanche that it started! I was there at the very start of it all, because Pa was a carpenter, working at the job he had been hired to work on, and he took along me and our sort of foster brother, Henry Steitler to help, early in the winter of 1847. Henry was sixteen then, and well-grown; he loved to build things, and work out better ways to make things work. He counted as a man, as things went, then. His father had died in an accident on the trail, and well… he had been part of our family ever since. He was tall and fair-haired, like me, so people just naturally took us to be blood-kin.
My name is Jonathan Mathew Kettering, and I had turned seven years old, on the early winter day that our wagon company came down the Yuba River track into that wide valley in the center of California. When I was eight years old, Pa and Henry and I went to work on Mr. Sutter’s new sawmill, in the hills. I wasn’t interested in any kind of school that involved reading books, to Ma’s despair. I escaped Ma’s notion of lessons any ways that I could, preferring to run wild in the woods and hills with my best pals, Will and Jimmy Greenwood. The Greenwood boys were part Indian and came by those ways naturally. Their older brothers were in the trail-guiding trade, their pa was Old Man Greenwood, the famous mountain man.
“Those wild boys are the worst kind of influence on Jon!” Ma exclaimed, the evening that Pa came home from Sutter’s place and told us that he was considering taking me to work on the sawmill in the hills. “Indeed – take Jonny-cakes with you, Elkanah.” (Johnny-cakes was my nickname among the family.)
“Might as well start him off, learning a good trade,” Pa agreed, and so that was what happened. I didn’t mind much. I really didn’t care anything for book learning, as it made my head ache something fierce.
We Ketterings and Henry Steitler had arrived in California as part of a company of ox-train immigrants in the trail season two years previous to the time of the story that I am telling. My Pa, Elkanah Kettering was captain of that company. Pa was a sensible man, and there was an old mountain man with us, Choctaw Joe Bayless, who knew the trail and the conditions in the west. Choctaw Joe had all that, as well as acquaintanceship with many of the tribes that we encountered. He knew their languages and their ways, right well enough, to ease our passage, and our company arrived safely in California, with the addition of a baby girl born on the very day that Pa’s company tackled the last high pass through the mountains.
A wagon company which followed the same trail as us, some weeks later had not such good fortune. They were stranded in deep snow for months. Half of them starved to death before rescue parties could be organized and come to their aid. Their awful suffering has been warning and a cautionary tale, ever since. My sister Sally’s best friend was one of the survivors – Ginny Reed. Sally threatened to scalp me good, if I ever asked Ginny anything about it. Ginny didn’t like to dwell on it, none.
So that was how Pa planned our winter in the hills – helping to build Captain Sutter’s sawmill. Ma and my older sister Sally were taken up with caring for our new baby sister, Emily-Anne. Our womenfolk were all planning to spend the months that we were away in our small cabin, on a patch of land near Sutter’s place, a settlement which was growing right crowded, even then. I had no interest in babies, anyway, no more than I had in Ma’s school lessons. Pa was saving up to purchase a nice tract of land closer to the coast, where he could plant wheat and run cattle, Ma could have her splendid garden, and we all live together in a big new house that he would build for us, rather than the cramped little cabin of unpeeled logs. Well, that was Pa’s intent, anyway. Before things changed.
Captain Sutter was the big impresario of those parts in the earlies. He had ambitious plans, when he hired Pa along with Mr. Marshall and a crew of Mormon boys to build a sawmill, on the south branch of the American River. Those hills that were like knees to that tall mountain range, mountains that were a barrier between California and the desert that we had crossed barely two years before. The river poured down from the foothills, and Captain Sutter hoped that the spring flood would power his mill. Pa needed the money to buy that tract of land that he had his eye on, so he took Captain Sutter’s coin. Captain Sutter needed lumber, lumber to build all those houses for those new settlers coming to California, now that it looked likely for it to become an American territory. The war with Mexico over it all seemed likely to be settled in our favor.
Anyway, we took off, up the rough track to the hills above the American River, just as winter set a white veil over the high mountain peaks beyond. Pa drove a wagon filled with supplies, canvas for tents, and trunks full of carpentering tools. I rode in the wagon with him, and Henry rode his tamed Indian paint pony that his father had bought from some Kanzas Indians, back when we started out on the trail. That pony was getting real-well mannered, finally, although it wasn’t anything for looks.
There were a number of picks and shovels among the gear in the wagon, and some wheel-barrows, as well.
“You see, Johnny-cakes,” Pa explained, “We’ll have to dig a mill-race, to channel the water from the river to turn a wheel that runs the saw. Dig the race, build the mill – all from the bare ground.”
“A lot of work,” Henry added. His pony was picking a careful way along side our jolting wagon. “But it saves a lot of work, in the long run.”
“A proper mill, so I am told, saves the work of thirty men working a pit-saw, day and night, sawing lumber from logs,” Pa explained. I thought about how I’d much rather be with Pa and Henry, working at building that saw-mill no matter how hard it might be, rather than doing home chores for Ma and enduring her efforts to teach me book-learning.