About this time, I can hear someone saying; “Well, did Pete ever show Eagle where the other gold was hidden”?
As a matter of fact, yes, he did. Am I going to tell you where to find it?
Nope!!
At least not until I go back and look for it myself. I have to put this MXT to work so that it can support itself. (And hopefully, me too.)
Frankly, I’m not even sure that it would still be in the same places that I was shown. Pete was pretty cagey, and it would be like him to decide I was taking too long to return and to move them somewhere else. I did make a half-hearted attempt to find one of the jars back in the late 1970s but didn’t spend much time on it, so left empty handed. But, on an up-note, I strongly feel that it is still there.
The problem is, like most “lost treasures”, though you are sure that you’ll never forget the details, the memory loses, or even changes some valuable pieces over several years of not being refreshed with the actual sight of what you intended to remember.
Trees grow bigger than you knew them. Other trees die and fall down, and then, they’re cut up for firewood. Then, maybe a new one grows, perhaps near, but not exactly where the original one was. When I returned after an absence of about 14 years, the cabin was gone, most of the fruit trees were gone, and the grape vines that Pete tended so lovingly had gone wild and spread out to cover probably 10 times the area that they had occupied before. Actually, about the only things that were changed very little, were the cedar and the apple tree. And, they were bigger.
But, as generally happens when I start “reliving” this particular era of my of my memories, I lose track of the main story line and start to stray, so I need to back up a little, to where my last post was.
Pete and I spent a relaxing afternoon, just talking and enjoying the sound of the river. It was getting late and though I didn’t really want to, I knew it was about time for me to return to my camp. We watched as a doe eased quietly through the shadows at the base of the hill and went to the edge of the river for a drink of cool water.
Pete said, “She’ll come back up here to the apple tree for a quick bite before she starts grazing”. And, sure enough, after her drink, she headed straight for the apple tree. All of the apples had already been eaten from the lower part of the tree, so she had to rear up on her hind legs to reach the ones higher up.
Beautiful!!
I stood up slowly and told Pete it would be 2 or 3 weeks before I would be able to come back up and visit. And then, we said our “so longs” and I waded back across and returned to my camp.
That was the last time I saw the old man. He stood at the edge watching me cross, until I was out of sight, in the growing dusk. I don’t know, but I think he had a premonition that our time together had come to an end.
It was actually 4 weekends before I could get back up to the river, and when I arrived across from Pete’s cabin, I found that the cabin had burnt to the ground, and, that the old saloon had been burnt down too.
There was some anger among the people up at Briceburg over the burnings. I was told that about a week after I was last there, Pete had passed away in his sleep and as soon as the Forest Rangers removed his body, they set fire to the cabin and the old saloon. The Rangers claimed they had done it for “public safety”.
They had come in a few days later with a work crew and cleaned up the area, hauling the ashes out in a couple of dump trucks. At least Pete’s legacy, the old cedar tree only got scorched a little on one side. Oh, and the apple tree was far enough from the fire that it wasn’t damaged.
I could not find anyone that had any idea of where the dump trucks took their loads, and no one had seen anything like a cast-iron stove on the trucks. As for myself, I had my suspicions about what these good people had been told, and what I feel really happened. But, it was quite a few years later, after seeing some of the underhanded dealings of the Forestry Service and the BLM, that I became convinced, (in my mind,) that Pete was probably murdered to get him out of the way so that they could start developing the river camp grounds. I have no doubts that the cabin was well searched before the fire, and that the gold in the stove had been found.
In those days, you could go into town and sell gold at just about any business, or trade it for goods. And that’s what Pete had been doing for most of his life. Well, something like that is bound to start tongues wagging. So there were many rumors about ‘ol Pete having gold stashed away somewhere. I had even been asked a couple of times, when I stopped in town, if 'ol Hermit Pete had shown me any of his gold. All I could do was look dumb and ask; "What gold"?
After this, I had little desire to go to Briceburg for dredging, or any thing else.
A couple of months later, aerospace started in on a downward trend, and the company I worked for began cutting back on personnel. I had a friend that worked there who had a large family. 12 (count em,) kids, all adopted. So when the lay-offs started getting serious, I volunteered to leave so that he would have a job to the end. I figured it would give him a little breathing space to find something else. It must have helped, I found out later that he started working for IBM shortly after that, and when I returned to CA in 1976, he was still employed by them.
Any way, shortly after quiting, I met a beautiful young lady and got married. We packed up and moved to Florida where I had a job waiting.
But, other than to say, after a few months working on auto electrical systems, I became a police officer, where I remained until 1976, when after being injured in the line of duty, I resigned, and my wife and I returned to California. And of course, we brought along our 2 children with us.
And, we’ll get back to the “lost treasures” in the next post.
Eagle
