Below Soda Creek, 1859

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crossed Anderson’s Lake

camped near farm

cam’d the bottom of Keithley Hill

cam’d on the Fraser

camped at the 14 mile stone

crossed Seaton Lake

camped on Rock Valley

camped with a packer

*

Sunday went to St John’s

Episcopal, Monday

got drunk, I am always

thinking of my dear

wife and blessed

boy, dream I arrive

in England, thinking

of home and those left

behind, dream my wife

unkind to me, wife and

boy’s portrait by my side,

in my mind thinking

of home and those

left behind, almost broken-

hearted thinking

*

bread, tea & cornmeal

mush & tea

a squirrel

some milk

1 rook & 1 hawk

12 lbs flour, 6 lbs beans

fish & duck from Indian

black tea

beef & bread

a toboggan & a horse

a coffin & fifty lbs

of gold dust on top

*

here I tell of the late Richard Willoughby who loaned me $30

when I was down on my luck and near starved

He was born a frontiersman, at the age of fourteen

bought softness at Mrs. Maloney’s with yellow dust

sifted from the headwaters of Rogue River.

A horseshoe-shaped scar raged on his left cheekbone,

whiskers shadowed his lips and chin.

He prayed to a God who’d drenched the grasslands

scarlet, was born again with each trigger-pull

of his breech-loading buffalo gun. He married

on Hope Mountain, found gold in Ruby Creek.

Every Monday he attended a concert.

The ambush at Okanagan wiped out his debts,

his funeral coat had the satiny sheen of rocks under rapids.

The breeze over Boothill Cemetery wafted spruce,

caught the cry of raven, cuckoo, white-throated swift.

Barbara Barnes