fiction
Lost Journalof a Carpinteria Pioneer
Story By JIM WILLIAMS T
HE OLD INDIAN SQUATTED ON A LOG BY THE NIGHT FIRE, HIS THIN STOOPED BODY AND TOOTHLESS MOUTH CHRONICLED
HIS TIME ON EARTH. He poked at the flames and coals with a stick of bleached driftwood, the roar and salty smell and spray of the Pacific at his naked back. He pointed a crooked finger and muttered in a language only the young Indian woman at his side seemed to fully understand. She nodded and translated the strange sounds and gestures into broken Spanish.
The old man was a Chumash Indian, a native of California’s windblown sand and reed-filled lagoons scattered along Alta (upper) California’s pristine coastline. He was the first of his kind I had met, and I was eager to understand his words.
The year was 1849, and I was a New Englander, a young farmer and schoolteacher, bound for the recent gold strike of John Marshall’s on Sutter Creek near Coloma, California, hundreds of miles north. I had camped here the day before, with my two traveling companions, among the salt marshes, sand and cliffs in what was named “La Carpinteria” on a crude map I carried. My companions had wanted to continue, but I insisted we rest for a couple of days after weeks on the trail. Our horses were thin, grass was plentiful, and my mare had developed a limp.
A small, gray-bearded Spaniard occupied the same log. We had met on the trail as he led his burro north from San Buenaventura. More Chumash lived up the coast and in inland valleys to the north, he said. He’d been a Franciscan Priest at the Santa Barbara Mis-
sion long before its 1834 secularization, but had remained in the area, to tend to a small flock of settlers and Indians. He translated the Indian girl’s limited Spanish into broken English for me. He pat- ted her on the shoulder and asked her to continue. The old Indian rubbed his stomach, an obvious gesture of hunger. I was chewing some beef jerky. I gave him a strip, which he quickly ate. I would have given him more, but our small supplies had to last until the goldfields.
“How old is he?” I asked.
He was her grandfather, she said. She asked him his age. His smile revealed only gums. He laughed, and seemed eager to continue talking with a strang- er. When meeting, he had looked at me—especially my boots—and laughed. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was the jingle-jangle of the big rowels of my Span- ish spurs, the corncob pipe I smoked, or the thick glasses mounted on my nose.
He wanted to try them on. I was reluctant, but let him. Without them I couldn’t see much. The magni- fication startled him. Then he laughed some more. To conserve our few matches, I also used them to focus the sun’s rays on twigs and dry grass to start our campfires, something I did almost daily on the trail from East Texas. I had briefly taught there in a one-room log schoolhouse before hearing about the discovery of gold. I, too, wanted to be rich. The girl gestured toward the moon. The Padre translated: “She says her grandfather’s not as old as that,” he said. “But close.”
I sat on my blanket and warmed my hands at the small fire, although the spring night was warm. The
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