Originally printed in Pulse Niagara
It was as though there was just no more frontier left. First, he’d run up against the Pacific Ocean, and stayed in California for a time, then Colorado, and then North. Blayze Stetson had finally made his way back to Nevada City with the intention of settling down, at long last. He didn’t know why he came to the city. In the city he was out of place. His clothes were all wrong, and so were his ways. He had a wide brimmed hat that was stained with soot and bacon grease. His clothes were old and patched and made of threadbare denim. There were flecks of foam at the corners of his mouth when he spoke. He wore dusty boots, that were always dusty. He kicked his feet together, for the simple satisfaction of seeing the little cloud of dust they made. He couldn’t help it. He loved that little cloud of dust.
The city made him feel like a bit of old denim used for a patch on a lady’s Sunday dress.
Blayze was a miner, the quintessential miner by now, by the looks of him anyway. He never made much money underground; he didn’t have the head for it and, never cared for the work. What he liked about mining was the style. He didn’t really worry about striking it rich. He liked camping and having cookouts with the other guys. He liked his comfortable old clothes and his greasy hat. He liked the food.
“I mean, who doesn’t love beans and biscuits and bacon?” he would say to himself, in his darker moments, when he questioned the choices he had made in life.
He spent his days living in mining camps, half listening out for a tip on an abandoned claim but mostly picking through the leavings of men who’d become rich and just up and left everything except the gold. The other men had started calling him ‘tin miner’ because of all the old tin pots and plates he collected from abandoned campsites. He had tons of them. He had heaps of old coffee pots and stacks of tin plates. Once he tried using them to craft some miniature stagecoach models, to sell to the other miners. They were pretty good. Unfortunately, the other miners didn’t have much interest in art.
Blayze had been too young for the best part of the gold rush in California. About three years too late, when he was fifteen, his Mother put him out and told him to get to California and strike it rich.
“I named you Blayze, with a ‘y’ so you would make something of yourself,” she said.
By the time he arrived in California any claim worth staking was bought up. The big outfits had moved in, and everybody was heading for Colorado.
“What with all them that are leavin’,” he soliloquized, “there ought to be enough gold for them that remain, hell, there ought to be gold up and down these roads, just with what’s fallen out of their pockets, racin’ off to Colorado.”
Turns out, people are careful with their gold. Blayze followed the trail of old washtubs and cutlery, picking up anything that seemed too good to throw out. By the time he reached Colorado his wagon was jangling like a jester, loaded and clanging with the metal detritus of human migration. From then on he was known as ‘the tin miner.’
When everybody left Colorado in ’98, for the Klondike, Blayze stuck around and collected tin for another season. Before long there was nobody to have a cookout with or to drink black coffee out of his best tin cups.
Near the old camp they had a town built up for the big outfits and their salaried men, who had been moving in and speculating. Sometimes, if he found himself in town for some errand or other, he might stop for a plate of beans and bacon. The people at the restaurant would say things like, “Sir, would you mind not kicking your boots together, you’re getting dust everywhere.”
When they served the beans they brought them on china plates, and they didn’t have that authentic smoked hickory flavour. Also, the bacon lacked authentic smoked hickory flavour. Blayze loved authentic smoked hickory flavour.
He left for the Klondike and followed his own tin road north. He followed the miners like a tin bloodhound, sniffing out every place they made camp, picking up every lost coffeepot lid and every cup deemed too filthy with mould to bother washing. He wanted to get back to camp. He wanted to find one more tin plate, cast away by the nouveau riche. He wanted to look like everybody around him. He was tired of being a cliché. He wanted to be a stereotype. Even if he wasn’t a real gold prospector. Even if he was only ‘the tin miner.’ He wanted to kick his boots together for the sake of a little cloud of dust. He wanted authentic smoked hickory flavour.
The North was cold and the Klondike was cruel to Blayze. There was little room for a tin miner in such pitiless surroundings. Food was scarce and bacon was scarcer. People were going hungry all around him. His money was running out. In desperation he dusted off his old model stagecoaches, hoping to trade them for beans or bacon, or even a biscuit, but Canadians had even less understanding of art than Americans. The winter turned colder than he knew it could get. He got a tin plate stuck to his tongue trying to clean-up the last of the bean gravy on it. It was the last humiliating straw.
Blayze loaded his tin onto his wagon, packed up the little display he used to showcase the model coaches, and headed south. He sold most of his remaining tin around Vancouver for less than he wanted, keeping only his best cup and plate, throwing the models in with the bargain. He told the tin merchant he could use them to spruce up his apartment, or give them as gifts. He got a fair price for the tin, but his workmanship went unrewarded.
Now, Nevada City loomed around him. He had a plate, a cup and a few dollars to his name. He reminded himself that he wasn’t Blayze Stetson, ‘tin miner’, anymore. He was just plain Blayze Stetson.
