Eureka! It’s the GOLD DIGGERS come to Pistols & Petticoats, and Jewel Jones—of JEWEL’S GOLD—is from a long line of gold diggers! Her daddy (Joshua Jones) and his daddy before him (Moses Jones, first met in book four SINS OF THE MOTHER of my Texas Romance Family Saga) mined gold in California all the way back to the 1850s during the Gold Rush of 1849. God blessed them, and the family is set financially for generations.
But Jewel’s father wanted to make it on his own, find the mother lode for himself on the claims he’d purchased on Troublesome Creek in Alaska. He just hadn’t found enough gold to warrant opening a mine before he perished. He had faith the mother lode was there though. Jewel loved traveling north with him, helping him in the wilderness in her teen years.
It’s 1895, and now Jewel is a grown, intelligent, headstrong Daddy’s girl bent on proving he was right about the Alaskan mine. Her mother’s dead set against the whole dreadful idea of going there again, but had made the bargain…
Why, you ask, did I decide to organize a collection for Gold Diggers?
So, back in December, my husband Ron and I took off on a research journey to ride the Oregon / California Trail for a covered wagon story. It was indeed a fabulous trip I highly recommend for western history lovers! But towards its end, we made a surprise stop at Sutter’s Mill on the American River. It was an unplanned treasure trove of fun and information.
It’s a park and museum with old buildings and replicas. Seeing the place where the California Gold Rush started in Coloma was awesome! When I talked Ron into going, on the map it only looked like twenty to twenty-five minutes. But the road winding around the mountain down to the beautiful river was an experience in itself!
The place was originally John Sutter’s lumber camp back in 1847. His foreman building the sawmill for him, John Marshall, discovered less than an ounce of shiny metal in January 1848. Some of the other workers started finding gold in their off hours. Rumors were first confirmed in the San Francisco newspaper that March, and by December that year, President James Polk made it official in an address to Congress that gold had been discovered in California, and the Gold Rush of 1849 was on!
The S.S. California was one of the steamships that made the voyage. She left New York in early January 1849 on her maiden mail run, scrambling to fill their vacant rooms with passengers. By the time the steamship got around Cape Horn and to Panama City on the Pacific, there were seven hundred people waiting to board to get to California.
In 1849, 40,000 miners took about ten million dollars in gold; the next year, forty-one million worth was mined. And the following year, that amount doubled to EIGHTY-ONE MILLION taken by a hundred thousand miners! After that year, mining levels declined until by 1865, mining brought in less than eighteen million. Isn’t that amazing?
Jewel’s father Joshua (born in book four SINS OF THE MOTHER of theTexas Romance Family Saga) had mining in his blood and passed it on to his daughter. I fell in love with Jewel. When writing, one needs to remember “unity of opposites” which is a nice way of saying the villain needs to be almost invincible, stronger, and more cunning than the heroine. This man we found in the character of Boaz Branson, the son of a con man set to salt Jewel’s mine to increase its value as his father had won a percentage of it in a poker game, but will he turn into a hero? And if he does, then who’s really the bad guy? It is a story that includes adventure, gumption, high stakes, murder, and mystery . . . oh, yes, and romance of course!
JEWEL’S GOLD is Book Four in a wonderful multi-author collection, including Amy Lillard, Chautona Having, Jennifer Beckstrand and myself! If you love the history of the wild west, you’re sure to enjoy the Gold Diggers Collection, launched this past month!
JEWEL’S GOLD is book four in the 2019 Gold Diggers Collection .
Caryl’s offering a free e-book copy of JEWEL’S GOLD to one of the commenters who answer this question:
Would you have followed your husband or want to go yourself to prospect for gold?
~*~
Best-selling author Caryl McAdoo is all about loving God and giving Him glory! Though western historical Christian romance is her favorite genre—especially family sagas—she also writes contemporary Red River Romances, Biblical fiction, and young adults and mid-grade readers. The prolific hybrid author loves singing the new songs the Lord gives her, too. (Take a listen at YouTube) Caryl counts four children and sixteen grandsugars life’s biggest blessings. She and high school sweetheart-husband Ron (fifty-plus years) live in the woods of Red River County about five miles south of Clarksville in the far northeast corner of the Lone Star State, waiting for God to open the next door.
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It seems like just last week I blogged with you all … well it was! But if you can stand me one more day, I’m going to continue along the El Camino Real and write about another Mission I visited not long ago.
One story tells of a dark vampire that once inhabited the church when it was in ruin. The tale says that there is a creature that will suck the blood from the toes of any hapless stranger who sleeps the night in the chapel and has the bad luck to remove his shoes. Maybe the tale has its origin in the owls who once perched in the building long ago. Maybe not. Maybe it’s just a myth!
church. Some say they feel her presence near the old laundry basin. It is said that tape recordings made at the cemetery and laundry area always seems to pick up stray whispers and the mournful wail of a Native American flute.
Now for where Addison and I worked. This is the backside of the Mission. We sat on the wishing well and I helped her vocalize the mission, without the ghosts, but it’s history. She did a fantastically beautiful drawing from this view. She’s like her PawPa, an artist at heart. I lost five dollars in coins to the wishing well.
Hi Everyone!
Here are some pics of the plaza and a gorgeous horse sculpture near the entrance of City Hall. And of course, where do we choose to eat lunch while in Healdsburg in the heart of wine country? Well, at a brewery, of course! I’m not sorry, the fish and fries were delicious!
Oh and the dessert was wonderful too.
In my last blog I wrote about the Mission La Purisima on the Camino Real in California. I promised to write more about it and some personal things that have happened in the ol’ haunted mission. Before I publish, what I think is an intriguing finish to my personal story about the La Purisima, I wanted to explore some more places along the King’s Highway that I’ve visited or became intrigued with.
from the Old Mission San Buenaventura after the earthquake of 1857.
To one lucky reader who comments, I’ll give you a choice of one of my eBook’s, including any anthology I’m in or one of my short stories. I’m looking forward to reading all of your comments. 
Dwelling in the past is something I love to do. Especially, when it involves ghost towns, gold, rivers, and hardy heroes. When I wrote my latest novella, “Gold Haven Heiress” from 
Keli Gwyn here to whisk you back in time. Imagine this. It’s 1866. You own a hydraulic mining operation in California. It’s the middle of the summer. There’s been no rain since May. Rivers are running low. Streams and creeks are drying up. But you need water to operate your mine. What do you do? Read on to find out how two bright men of yesteryear, who lived where I do now, came up with a solution.
Mine owners were happy…provided they had water. In order to get that precious commodity, ditches (canals) were built to divert water from the sources to the mines. The ditches might be able to supply enough water for smaller operations, but the big hydraulic mines needed more than that. John Kirk, an engineer from Pennsylvania, had anticipated this need. A forward thinker, he bought the water rights to many Sierra lakes high above the Gold Country. He and his partner, surveyor Francis A. Bishop, envisioned a canal that would bring water from the mountains to the foothills below. Although their plan for the canal was well thought-out, they’d completed less than one mile when they ran out of funds in 1871.
The monumental task required a massive workforce. Over one thousand Chinese laborers came up from San Francisco, assisted by about a hundred Euro-Americans, mostly Italian. The canal cost the Company between $650,000 and $700,000, or about $25,000 per mile.
I was so impressed by the men who designed and built the El Dorado Canal that I decided to honor them in my August 2016 release, Make-Believe Beau. The hero and heroine of my latest book, Flynt and Jessie, work for the El Dorado Water and Deep Gravel Mining Company. I took fictional license in staffing the engineering department. Flynt is the engineer. Jessie is his newly hired draftswoman, which creates a stir in the office. While the story focuses on their romance—both the feigned one and the real one—I worked in as much of the history of the El Dorado Canal as I could. I’m sneaky that way. 🙂
or You:
It’s different on the coast. Salt in the air. Brine.”
Arroyo Grande’s wooden jail house was the object of scorn and breaking out was somewhat of a town joke. On several occasions prisoners skipped town taking along the iron chains that were meant to hold them prisoners.
