By the afternoon the bar,
affectionately referred to as the "Beer Tree", a picnic table in the shade
of a large Walnut Tree across the road from the store, was held down by a
half-dozen regulars. Calls of "Look out for your wives boys, here comes
Arnie” greeted a newcomer to the River. He had arrived three weeks before,
a friend of someone's, knowing nothing of mining, and having located as a
partner a young woman he jokingly referred to as his ore body, one of the
few mining terms his mind had fixed on, had disappeared up the East Fork of
the South Fork of the Salmon River for the past two weeks.
There was something strange, apparitional
and intoxicated in the manner of the sunburned pair as they approached the
bar. Beer was shoved to their end of the table
and room made to accommodate them on the benches, but the pair still stood
shifting their feet and only exchanging shy, dazed glances between
themselves. "Well did you get much," someone asked rhetorically to a
chorus of laughs.
Arnie raised one hand in a portentous
gesture for silence and held out the other toward his partner Bella. She
opened a large leather purse and handed over a two-ounce vial of fine gold
dust, at the time, worth something over a thousand dollars. "That ain't bad
for a couple of weeks work," someone offered, but passing the vial to the
first man at the table, Arnie reached out again and was presented with a
second bottle, and then to the amazement of the assembled, a third appeared.
The Beer Tree, Winter 2004
When the three vials had been set into
circulation Arnie spoke breathlessly his first words to the outside world,
"We got it all
from one crack in the river. When we got the overburden
off
all I could see was a solid streak of these..." Arnie reached out both hands
and was handed three more bottles, each filled with nuggets the size of
dried peas. He sat the gold on the table with a gesture of abandonment of
lesser treasures and continued, "But then I spotted this." Reaching out
carelessly he was handed a half-ounce nugget. The table was thunderstruck.
"And I was picking nuggets out of the crack with tweezers when I spotted
this..."
Arnie paused, newly astonished at the array of gold laid out on the table and Jim Hensher, a local Indian man, remarked solemnly, "Get ready boys, he's going to pull a diamond on us.
"It was stuck to a rusty spike and the face was flashing at me in the sun coming through the water,” Bella handed him an 1835 five dollar gold piece that looked like it had just come from the mint. "I thought I was going to panic and loose the little stuff getting at that coin," he admitted.