Gold Diggers by Eden Monroe

 

 Eden Monroe's BWL Author Website

The JW Tanner Ranch in Gold Digger Among Us was built on Klondike gold.

It was the fictitious Tanner brothers, Jacob and William, who joined that famous stampede to the north and beat overwhelming odds to return as wealthy men. Financially set, they expanded their modest family acreage and realized their dream of being the area’s biggest outfit, stocking their spread with prime Charolais beef cattle and fine horses.

The thousands in real life who sought gold in that almighty rush to the Klondike, unwittingly helped write one of the most compelling chapters in our history. There were certainly fortunes earned there, but to accomplish it often took extraordinary effort. Many prospectors toiled in vain, and the deprivations suffered in that unforgiving land were legendary; unprecedented hardships experienced in the search for that most precious of all metals.

As author Pierre Berton describes in Klondike, the Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899, one such grueling episode took place after countless boats seeking the gold fields were caught on the river at freeze up, a particularly harsh event for those forced to backtrack in an exhausting sixty-five mile trek.

“In mid-October one thousand men, women and children were shivering in tents on the banks of the Klondike (actual name of river is Thron-diuck, but famously mispronounced), but by December first some nine hundred had retraced their steps. Scores attempted to return up the frozen river to the passes, rending their clothes, shredding their moccasins and shattering their sleighs on the sharp blocks of ice that were sometimes heaped as high as twenty feet….

“All of this time the temperature hung at fifty below zero, so cold that any man moving faster than a tortoise pace felt the chill air sear his lungs. On November 29^th the temperature dipped again to sixty-seven below; so that trees cracked like pistol shots with the freezing and expanding sap, cooked beans turned hard as pebbles, and the touch of metal tore the skin from naked fingers….”

Tales of those formidable Klondike days inspired my Tanner story, and although Gold Digger Among Us takes place in present day, descendent Dade Tanner is that same breed of rugged men, at times ruthless, but every inch a Tanner and fiercely proud of it. Men who stay the course and are not easily tamed. Men who are at one with the land.  

“Dade thought about how good it would feel to take his shirt off as he glanced at the sun that rose unsparingly above the horizon, fiery orange and punishing over what was quickly becoming the parched landscape of the twenty-thousand acre JW Tanner Ranch.

“The overseer of the entire ranch and its various divisions, he still liked getting out on the land, and did indeed strip to his waist when working in the hayfields or swinging a hammer fixing fences, his broad shoulders, well-muscled chest and powerful forearms tanned to a deep bronze under the summer sun.”

But a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and now the very existence of JW Tanner Ranch is threatened from within by the greed of Virgil Tanner, Dade’s spoiled, self-indulgent older brother who is fired by that early lust for gold.  However there is a striking difference between him and his industrious forebears because Virgil expects to get rich without the necessary hard work, and the father, Buck Tanner, is unfailingly blind to his oldest son’s unscrupulous get-rich-quick scheme.

“Buck shook his head grimly, obviously disgusted, then getting tiredly to his feet, explained that he wanted to be alone for a while to think.

“Virgil was mentally doing the happy dance. Too bad, little brother, you lose. The signing of the ranch over to him was now just a formality, he could feel it in his bones. And once everything was in place, he, Virgil Tanner, was going to be one filthy rich hombre. He had just what he needed in his suitcase to accomplish it.”

In Gold Digger Among Us it was gold that built a dream, and like those first Tanner brothers prospecting in the Klondike, the primal urge for it still captures our imagination. Only the circumstances of its acquisition has changed, although there still seems to be plenty of it to supply modern-day needs.

               According to the scientific agency, the United States Geological Survey (USGS), most of the gold fabricated today is for the manufacture of jewellery, but it’s also an industrial metal used in any number of items, from computers and communication equipment, to spacecraft and jet aircraft engines in which this essential element performs critical functions.

Gold fever will likely always exist, whether it’s the romantic notion of finding gold nuggets (the largest single mass of gold ever discovered was the Holtermann Nugget at 10,229 ounces found in 1872 in Australia – geologypage.com), or winning what is arguably the most treasured of all gold, a wedding ring, there does not seem to be any danger of it losing its appeal.

Raw gold is present on every continent in various concentrations, most of what has been found to date has come from just three countries: China, Australia and South Africa (the US ranked fourth in 2016), says the USGS. So far “about 244,000 metric tons of gold has been discovered” in the world, and the unrelenting quest continues….