Having exhausted our claim, my two partners left me both to return home to New York. Being thus left once more alone, I determined upon proceeding still farther south—to the Tuolumne river, there to try my fortune during the summer.
On my way to the Tuolumne, I fell in with a man named Richard Guinane, who had just come up from San Francisco City. He was also en route for the diggings at Tuolumne; and we arranged to travel together.
He was going to try his luck in gold seeking for the second time; and, finding him an agreeable companion, I proposed that we should become partners. My proposal was accepted—on the condition that we should stop awhile on the Stanislaus—a river of whose auriferous deposits my new partner had formed a very high opinion.
To this I made no objection; and, on reaching the Stanislaus, we pitched our tents upon its northern bank.
When I became a little acquainted with the past history of my companion, I might reasonably have been expected to object to the partnership. From his own account, he was born to ill-luck: and, such being the case, I could scarce hope that fortune would favour me—so long as I was in his company. Assuredly was Richard Guinane the victim of unfortunate circumstances. There are many such in the world, though few whom Fortune will not sometimes favour with her smiles—when they are deserved; and, ofttimes, when they are not.
Richard Guinane, according to his own account of himself, was one of these few. Circumstances seemed to have been always against him. Each benevolent, or praiseworthy action he might perform, appeared to the world as dictated by some base and selfish feeling! Whenever he attempted to confer a favour, the effort resulted in an injury, to those whom he meant to benefit. Whenever he tried to win a friend, it ended by his making an enemy!
His hopes of happiness had ever proved delusive—his anticipations of misery were always realised!
Pride, honour, in short, every noble feeling that man should possess, appeared to be his; and yet fate so controlled those sentiments, that each manifestation of them seemed, to the world, the reverse of the true motive that inspired it. Such was Guinane’s character—partly drawn from statements furnished by himself, and partly from facts that came under my own observation.
Certain circumstances of his life, which he made known to me, had produced an impression on my memory; but more especially those of which I was myself a spectator, and which brought his unhappy existence to an abrupt and tragical termination. The history of his life is too strange to be left unrecorded.
Richard Guinane was a native of New York State, where his father died before he was quite five years of age—leaving a wife and three children, of whom Dick was the eldest.