Calico by Lee Goldberg

Author:Lee Goldberg [Goldberg, Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-07-03T16:00:00+00:00

TWENTY

Calico, 1885

Calico was booming. Or so it seemed. The main street on the butte was bustling with seventy-five businesses serving the 3,500 people, primarily single men, living and working in the mountains, canyons, and valley floor. There were hundreds of mines and dozens of stamp mills pounding the silver out of the rocks. The mining companies were extracting millions of dollars’ worth of silver from the mountains, but most of that wealth was going to the owners back east.

The slim percentage of profits being invested in the community went toward satisfying the basic needs of the inhabitants – which were food, water, and sex, and not necessarily in that order. Nothing was spent on things that would enhance the quality of life, or create anything of permanence, that would allow Calico to evolve from a mining camp to a town.

Wells were drilled, tanks were built, and pipe was laid to get running water to the mines and most of the businesses on Main Street, but there still wasn’t any kind of sanitation system. Waste continued to pile up on the street and spill unfiltered into Jack Ass Gulch, creating an unbelievable stench.

The whore population had swelled to fifty and there were dozens of professional gamblers lurking among the bars and gambling halls. There was a post office, but no banks. There was a jail, but no sheriff or deputies.

Luckily, the population was generally peaceable, but when a serious offense or crime was committed, such as cheating at cards, theft, or murder, the people were quick to rise up in fury or indignation, restrain the miscreant, and drag him to the jail to await Judge Orville’s ruling, though mob justice did, at times, prevail before he had a chance to adjudicate anything. There might have been more hangings if there had actually been an old tree in town. But sturdy trees wouldn’t grow on the inhospitable landscape and wood was too valuable to waste on hangings or on erecting gallows when it could go towards building a whorehouse, privy, or saloon instead.

Despite the fire that had decimated Calico, half of the buildings were still made of wood, the rest were made of stone or adobe.

A school was being built for the camp’s thirty children, that would also double as a ‘town hall’ for community meetings, dances, and trials. But there wasn’t a single church in Calico and preachers rarely visited, because they knew there wouldn’t be a nickel donated for their collection pot when it could be better spent on a bet, a beer, or a biscuit.

The way Owen looked at it, Calico wasn’t a place where people wanted to live. It was a place people had to endure. People working outdoors, or in the businesses on Main Street, had to suffer the scorching desert heat by day, often in the triple digits, and bone-chilling cold on winter nights. The only relief was in the mines, where it was a constant sixty-five degrees, but it was hard to enjoy the subterranean

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