1856
📷
Oroville, California
Monday, April 14th
Their handwritten marriage license, one of the first issued in Butte County, would simply state that William Delaney and Ellen Joyce, both from Thompson’s Flat were married at the Orleans Hotel in Oroville, on the south bank of the Feather River. Their story was far more complicated than that.
The “hotel,” if you could call it that, was a hastily-built structure with a few granite boulders, lots of river stone and nearly as much mortar as rocks. The interior “walls” were repurposed canvas tarps to create separation between the “main hall,” such as it was, and the sleeping quarters. You could hear what was going on the other side of the tarps, not that you wanted to.
Outside the hotel, on either side of the river, work crews continued to work the freezing runoff in rockers and cradles in hopes of finding that nugget that would turn their fortunes around or at least give them the means to leave this god-forsaken place. But, at this point, years after a man with a pan could make a fortune, their chances were about as good as drawing the one card they needed for an inside straight flush.
William had met Ellen months before in an establishment less grand than this one. He couldn’t remember its name. It had likely changed. They all did. He knew the street, that was enough. The saloons were all pretty much the same.
He had seen her – all the men had seen her – at one of the saloons or dance halls that littered Oak Street. She wasn’t much to look at – small and sturdy, a charitable description – but when they were only a handful of women in town, any creature without bollocks was a maiden.
Looking, straight at him, her first words were, “C’mere! Are you goin’ to stand there like an idiot or are you going to ask me to dance?”
William, looking first to his left and right, felt like he was home. In Cork. “Miss, are you talkin’ to me?”
“The name’s Ellen. Now take my hand, would ya?”
“William.”
The two of them walked onto the crowded floor. It had felt fine to touch her hands –muscled, but not calloused and sun-baked.
As the fiddler played, the two of them – equally matched in height, she a bit stockier – danced something closer to a jig than a waltz. For a time, William was a continent and an ocean away. But then the music stopped.
“Have you got any flakes?” Ellen asked.
“Miss?”
“Gold. For the dance”
Flakes. Gold. I am an idiot. She was dancing for money. The last gold he had seen – two pieces smaller than pumpkin seeds – came three days ago and he had traded that for his food and liquor.
“I … I …” William stammered.
“Ah, never mind,” Ellen said as she walked away. He watched as she took another miner’s hand. Olive-skinned. Not Mexican, maybe Chileno.
William Delaney walked down Oak Street, scuffling his boots in the dirt.
William kept seeing Ellen in one place or another. He would watch as she collected flakes and dust in a little cloth bag. He sometimes saw her walk into the night with a man. He gathered she might do a bit more than dance for a nugget of gold.
She walked off a rough-hewn dance floor one night and again took William’s hand. “Ready to give it another go?” The truth was Ellen preferred William’s company to that of the other men. He was like her, a man of fields and glens, not ravines and watercourses. Not a beefy man from Illinois or Missouri. Not a man who traveled the ocean but spoke another tongue.
She thought he looked like a jockey, a sweepstakes winner. This time, they didn’t step onto the dance floor. Instead, she led him to an alley behind the saloon.
“Kiss me,” she said.
And now, six weeks later, the two of them were here in the front hall of the Orleans Hotel, in the presence of a Justice of the peace, with the man who worked the claim next to William and a woman who shared Ellen’s small room. The proceedings concluded, William ordered a shot of whiskey for each of them, even the Justice. Pray God, the proprietor would let him put it on account.
William raised his glass towards his bride. “May you live all the days of your life.”
Ellen smiling, demure, looked at her husband. “Sláinte!”
“Sláinte,” their guests said in unison, even though they didn’t know what those words meant.
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