This time of day was just about the only part of life that
James Marshall enjoyed: Seeing the West reflected into the East, changing
the sky into a sky of molten gold.
James chuckled bitterly…molten
gold… His own gold, now long gone, was only brass in his mind. His mind was filled with what-ifs about the past, when he found gold flakes which had ruined
his life, ruined his life but good.
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| Where Marshall found gold flakes |
If only John Sutter had been just a smidgen parsimonious. Sutter spent money he did not have, borrowed
money he could not repay, and lost his own fortune.
Marshall clenched his misshapen hands when he thought
about Sutter. All the work Marshall had
done, breaking bones in his hands, and for nothing. No blessings
showered on me then. Or now.
With all that could have been, Marshall could not gain any traction
in keeping his sawmill running. His workers had dropped their tools and picked up pans, went to the American River. Penniless again.
He pleaded with the California State Legislature and they
awarded him with a two-year pension.
What he really desired was some investigative search into the
theft of his future.
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| What if..what if... Re-creation of James Marshall's homesteader cabin at the end of his life-- While on a field trip of middle-schoolers, I saw this. Pretty sparse. |
So here he sat, gazing at the dusky sky disappear, before he
arose and went into his homestead shack. If only,
if only…
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| Source
Thanks go to Delores at Under the Porch Light for challenging writers to create poems, prose, fiction, etc. Each week Delores provides six unrelated words with which to create something comprehensible, or not. The underlined words above are the words provided. Please click on the lone grapefruit in the right sidebar to access her site. Interesting stuff, there.
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