Gold Rush Resources: Reader's Theater for The Ballad of Lucy Whipple

Script written by Anne Miller

Characters:

• Narrator 1
• Narrator 2
• Lucy Whipple
• Butte Whipple (Lucy's brother)
• Gent (a miner)
• Amos Frogge (a miner)
• Jimmy (a miner)

Narrator 1:

Lucy Whipple's mother hoped for adventure and riches when she and her four children moved to California. She had already lost two children and had watched her husband die in Massachusetts and she was ready to create a new future for herself and her family. Her decision was unusual for a woman at that time. The lure of gold and adventure brought hordes of prospectors into California during the late 1840s but only 10 % of them were women and children. Unfortunately, for most of these adventurers (men or women) mining for gold proved to be hard, backbreaking, and unprofitable. To make things worse, the harsh and unsanitary living conditions in the camps often caused miners to fall victim to diseases such as tuberculosis, typhoid, smallpox and cholera. Illness and death were as much a part of their world as the gold that they sought.

Narrator 2:

That winter was the coldest and wettest anyone could remember. Rain fell day after day on the tents and trees and the blacksmith shop, on the half-built wooden buildings and the piles of garbage in the street, on rabbit burrows and grizzly caves, on Indians and miners and shopkeepers. And when it finally stopped raining, it started to snow.

(Lucy and her brother Butte are sitting in their tent, trying to keep warm. Lucy is writing a letter. Lucy looks up to read the letter.)

Lucy:

Dear Gram and Grampop,

Mama got herself a job running a boarding house for Mr. Scatter, who owns the saloon and the general store here in Lucky Diggings. The boarding house is a tent. So are the saloon and the general store. I think if you die here and go to Heaven, it's also a tent. Only bigger. Amos Frogge says miners are thieves and drunkards, men of bad habits and worse dispositions; others can be counted as the finest folk on God's green earth. I'm sick of them all - dirty boots and dirty sheets, loud voices and big appetites. How I long for home.

I now have a shelf next to my bed. It kind of wobbles, but it holds my aprons and stockings, a shell from the Massachusetts shore, my copy of Ivanhoe, and an empty herring tub where I plan to keep your letters when they come. Jimmy says writing letters is like tossing words to the wind, for the mail takes three months or more to get all the way to Massachussetts and three months or so to get back here, if it doesn't get stolen by outlaws, lost in a landslide or sunk to the bottom of the sea. He says writing letters is an act of faith.

Except for letters, I'm not strong on faith these days. I had faith Pa would always be with me and he died. I had faith that I'd be safe at home and here I am stuck in this wilderness. I suspect I'm just about out of faith.

(Three miners, the Gent, Amos, and Jimmy Whiskers burst in through the flap of the tent, rubbing their arms and blowing on hands from the cold. Speak with a western drawl.)

Jimmy:

Dang bab it, little sister, it's so cold out there, my britches is froze to my bum, pardon me altogether.

Gent:

Watch your language. There are ladies present. Sorry sister, but it's as cold as a witch's tit out there We'll just warm ourselves by the fire a bit before we head back out.

Jimmy:

What we need is some whisky to warm us up from the inside.

Gent:

Well, we don't got none of that right now so start thinkin' of somethin' else. What we need is a distraction from all this wet and cold.

Jimmy:

Amos - tell us a story. You know lotsa good stories.

Butte and Lucy:

Butte:

Tell us a story, Amos.

Lucy:

Yes, Amos. Please tell us a story.

Amos:

Well I can tell you a ballad that I learned me in Texas. Hey, Gent you remember the one about Rattlesnake Jake?

Gent:

Sure I do!

Amos:

Then you can help me out. You just sit back and listen, sis, and I'll tell you a good one. Imagine we're outside, settin' round a fire of cow pies and dry grass. But for the fire, it's so dark you couldn't find your nose with both hands and there you sit, lookin' at the moon through the neck of a bottle and listenin' to the coyotes sing when someone starts in tellin':

This here's the ballad of Rattlesnake Jake,
A man as mean as sin.
He used barbed wire to comb his hair
And gargled with straight gin.

He picked his teeth with a Bowie knife.
He'd rob, he'd shoot, he'd kill.
He pushed old ladies off of cliffs
And babies down the hill.

Jimmy:

Thunderation! What a villain! If I ever caught up with him I'd. (Gent shushes him)

Gent:

Till Sheriff Bueller came to town
With star of shiny tin.
Said, "I swear on my mother's grave,
I'm brinigin' that outlaw in."

So while the townfolk all raised Hell,
No one went to jail
For the Sheriff was busy as bees in June
Following Rattlesnake's trail.

Amos:

He tracked him through the mountain snow
And down the river he chased
Till in a cabin dark as death
The two came face to face.

The sheriff stood in the cabin door,
His eyes were mad and hot.
But Jake was ready, cool as ice
And dropped him in one shot.

Gent:

When the posse caught up with Rattleshake,
Jake drawled with a sneer,
'Sorry the sheriff got in the way.
I was aimin for a bear."

Jimmy:

Whooee that story is taller than it is wide. Enough of stories. It's time for that whiskey I was talking about. Let's go count some more snowflakes and find us some.

Amos:

All right. You convinced me. You comin' Gent?

(Gent nods and the three leave the tent. Lucy stands up and starts sweeping the floor.)

Butte:

Lucy?

(Lucy turns and looks at Butte.)

I'm thinking about that sheriff, the one who was killed. What do you think happens when we die? I mean, Papa died and Golden and Ocean. Ocean, nobody talks about her. As though she never was. I remember Golden and the pneumonia, but all I know about Ocean is she was there and then not there.

Lucy:

Papa used to talk to me about her, but Mama won't. Never said her name to me as far as I can recall. Papa used to say she was no bigger than a minute, with yellow ringlets and a dimple in her chin.

Once Mama took her through the woods to Oakbridge. You and I were just getting over the quinsy and stayed with Gram. On the way back from town, Mama sat down to get a stone out of her shoe and Ocean disappeared. They searched for a mighty long time, but nobody ever saw her again. We don't know was it Indians or outlaws or wolves or what.

Butte:

Do you think she's dead?

Lucy:

I reckon so. No one rightly knows.

Butte:

If she's alive, I wonder what she looks like now. If she's dead, I wonder what she looks like.

Lucy:

Butte, how morbid and awful.

Butte:

I wonder what Pa looks like now.

Lucy:

(shocked)

Butte! (Starts sweeping busily, trying to ignore him.)

Butte:

I don't mean to be morbid, Luce. He's still my pa, even now, and I wonder what he looks like, is all. Is his skin hanging in tatters? Is he just bones? Are his fingers and toes-

Lucy:

Butte, you're making me sick. Why do you think about things like that?

Butte:

Sometimes I like to think of things that are bad or scary, kind of like practicing for being brave. I have to be brave now that Pa's dead and except for me you're all females.

Lucy:

Females can be brave too, Butte.

Butte:Yeah, but you ain't very and I'm the next oldest so I reckon it's up to me. I don't think I'd be near as brave if I didn't feel I had to.

Lucy:

Well, stop worrying about being so brave because you're not and you're just scaring the rest of us.

(Butte hits her playfully and then leaves the stage. Lucy comes towards the front and starts writing another letter.)

Lucy:

Dear Gram and Grampop,

I forgot to tell you in my last letter. I am grown mighty popular and it is all due to the box of books from Miss Homer. Men I have never spoken to this past whole year come up to me, hat in hand and say, "Excuse me entirely, little sister, but I hear you might have some books for borryiing."

I have become a one-person lending library. My library has two rules:

I get to read the books first. And No chewing tobacco stains.

I used to have a third rule - Return what you borrow to ME. Do not lend it to someone else - but everyone broke that rule. Besides, the books always seem to come back to me eventually. so I have eliminated that one. One miner wrapped about five dollars worth of dust in a cigarette paper and put it between pages 24 and 25 of Rip Van Winkle and it was still there when the book came back to me. I have used it toward paying off Bean Belly Thompson for carrying the books.

I figure it will be spring by the time you get this so next time you visit Pa's grave, please plant some flowers on it for Butte and me, larkspur if you can find it for we have that here and I would like to think we are looking at the same thing, even if I look at the flowers and he looks at the roots. Mama says Pa is in Heaven with God, but the last time I saw him he was in a box in the ground in Massachusetts, so that's how I tend to think of him. Not that I don't believe in God. I do. I'm just not sure that I believe in Heaven, at least not like I believe in the public library.