Pick a Camp, Any Camp

The Spoon the Book Is Named For

From the Long Wharf, Jack and Praiseworthy catch the four o’clock riverboat up the Sacramento River toward the gold fields. Before they go, Jack buys himself a horn spoon on the wharf with a pinch of gold dust — the very object the book is named after!

Miners used horn spoons (carved from ox horn) to scoop up gold dust. Jack tucks his in his belt and decides all he needs now is “a red flannel shirt and a floppy hat” to look like a real miner.

The Greatest Town Names in History

On the riverboat, Praiseworthy reads aloud from a list of real gold-camp names, worrying what Aunt Arabella would think of the addresses. The names in the book are real: “Chili Gulch, Grizzly Flats, Timbuctoo… Rough and Ready… You Bet… Humbug… Rawhide, Roaring Camp…”

Praiseworthy frets, “What would she think if you write from a place like Bedbug or Whiskey Flat or Hangtown?” Jack, of course, immediately picks the most dangerous-sounding one: “Hangtown!”

This is true to history — Gold Rush miners named their camps with total honesty and a wicked sense of humor. The names told you exactly what you were getting into.

The Stagecoach to Hangtown

From Sacramento, the last leg to Hangtown is by stagecoach, and Fleischman makes it a white-knuckle ride:

The stagecoach climbed as if it were part mountain goat. It lurched, it halted, it bucked, it leaped and it clung.

— By the Great Horn Spoon!, Chapter 9

Below the trail, the pine trees “looked to Jack like sharp green lances waiting to skewer them if they slipped.” Sometimes the passengers had to climb out and push the coach up the steep grades. The mountains were no joke.