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.