092- The Pistol

Tired of the everyday routine, ever dream of a life of romantic adventure, want to get away from it all? We offer you... Escape! Escape! Designed to free you from the four walls of today for a half hour of high adventure.

Tonight we escape to an early California gold camp and an exciting tale of frontier revenge as Les Crutchfield tells it in his colorful story, the pistol. San Francisco Bay was a graveyard that summer. With over 300 deserted wind jammers lying at anchor, and the city itself the next step to a ghost town.

Every man who could walk, run or staggered, headed inland, looked for gold, and the women had followed. Mostly they traveled up the river as far as Sacramento and fanned out into the hills. That was the jumping off place.

Sacramento. on the Sacramento River, but only one coach six-year-old.

Now did I hear a bit of say, a little fifty-nine. Thank you, sir. The man says two fifty. All right, he will go. I stood there in the hot sun on the Sacramento waterfront and watched the crowd bitten for the pistol.

Rousedabouts, gamblers, vaqueros, gold miners, men from everywhere, and from nowhere, and a few women. I wanted that gun myself. I wanted it bad. I was taking a stagecoach to rawhide flats in the morning, where my brother Dave and his partner located a rich clay.

And I didn't plan to load myself down with an outfit, but a gun was different. I was packing a thousand dollars in gold eagles, and I was ready to lay out a good part of it to get that six-shooter.

The bidden reached $500. Oh, right, anybody else, anybody making $550? Five in the quarter, five in the quarter, anybody else? All right, going once, going twice. $600. $600 in the new bidder, I have $600, gentlemen here, bitch, $600.