Robin Lee Thatcher - [The Sisters of Bethlehem Springs] by A Matter of Character

Author:A Matter of Character
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

For ten years I owned the Golden Nugget and added numerous other businesses as well. I began to educate myself, although at first it was without purpose beyond wanting to prove myself smarter than the next man. But eventually I read for the law. I grew wealthier than I ever dreamed I might, but I took little pleasure in all I acquired. I was restless and looking for something that would ease my dissatisfaction. I looked in the wrong places for an answer to my discontentment.

When news arrived of a gold strike in what would soon become the Idaho Territory, I felt a strange longing to return. I even thought of looking for Gemma Picard when I got there—not that I believed she would still be waiting for me in that old cabin we’ d shared. It had been thirteen years since I left her for the promises of riches in California.

I sold the Golden Nugget and my other properties, including a mercantile and a bank, and I headed north. Certainly I was going back to the high country in better style than I had traveled on my way to California. I no longer wore tanned animal skins for my clothes. My suits were tailored, my shoes of the best quality. For all appearances sake, I was a man of quality and some importance. Inside, I know now, I was a man consumed by the maggots of sin.

I settled in West Bannock in the very heart of gold country. Two years later, the town was rechristened Idaho City. It was a bawdy place where whiskey was cheaper than water. Just the sort of place where men like me belonged. But again, I wasn’t there to pan for gold. I was there to take the gold from others the easiest way I knew how. Before I left Idaho City, I owned four of the eventual forty-one saloons that sprang up. Two of mine had fancy billiard rooms. I also had my own law office. For a while, I thought the place might end up with more lawyers than all the other laborers added together because there was plenty of call for them. All of the law offices were kept busy with disputes over mining claims.

The year before I left Idaho City, a fire destroyed eighty percent of the buildings. I was one of the lucky twenty-percent. My home and businesses survived unscathed, and during the time it took folks to rebuild the many other saloons, mercantiles, breweries, barber shops, dress shops, bakeries, livery stables, banks, and drug stores, I made another small fortune.

And it got me to thinking about how much competition there was in Idaho City. I decided that another place might suit me better. A town where they had fewer lawyers and definitely fewer saloons.

In 1866, at the age of forty-five, I sold everything once again, making another tidy profit, and moved to Bethlehem Springs, Idaho. It would prove a life-altering decision.

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