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He had paid £3 5s for a steerage berth aboard the 2,000 ton clipper Emma Fields from Liverpool to New York. His ticket guaranteed him 18 inches on a bunk plus luggage space. He had little luggage but he stocked up on provisions, on the advice of a sailor he met in an alehouse, and kept the £100 his mother had given him as his inheritance in a money belt around his waist.

The bunks were of planking and were six feet square. He shared one with a thin Irishman and his wife and son, into whose acquaintance he was thrust as soon as he boarded. He defended them against two bullies who wished to take the bunk as their own because of its proximity to the hatch and fresh air. As the bullies retreated, Patrick Ford offered him the fourth space.

He hadn’t been looking to make friends but, after a nightmare crossing of 36 days, during which the cargo of migrants were twice battened down below decks as they sailed through storms, it was inevitable that bonds were forged.

Patrick and Fidelma and their small son Brian were escaping starvation in Ireland but they faced hunger again on the Emma Fields. They had relied on the promised basic shipboard rations but these proved to be inadequate. Robert shared with them his own supplies.

At the port of New York, they remained together through the turmoil of disembarkation. The family planned to join Patrick's brother, Michael, in Indiana, but they faced a fresh disaster when Patrick discovered the dollars he’d bought in Liverpool were forgeries. Again, Robert stepped in and paid for the transportation of them all to the state that, he learned, was famous for pigs.

Indiana had an excellent transport system along the river networks that fed into the Ohio and Lake Huron and 200,000 hogs a year were being raised and slaughtered. Land was 5s an acre and, staked by Robert, the brothers bought an 80 acre farm that they used as collateral to add an adjoining 80 acres. On Michael's advice, Robert also bought 40 acres close to the town of Petersville, as an investment.

All this industry suited Robert and he worked hard for a year but his ambition was still to make a fortune and he didn’t see that happening on a hog farm. He left the Ford family to head West. He had 10 dollars in his pocket, his father's sabre strapped to his horse, a brace of pistols in saddle holsters and a new muzzle loading Springfield rifle. During his journey, he heard gold had been found in California. He now had his destination.

The gold that started the rush was found on January 24, 1848. Three months later, the secret was out and gold fever had taken hold. By the end of the year, 6,000 men were working at diggings along the rivers and icy streams that came down from the Sierras. The following year, the forty niners arrived: 90,000 of them, by land, by sea around the Horn, across the Isthmus of Panama and even across Nicaragua.

Robert had left Indiana in the spring of forty eight and, once across the Missouri, faced a 2,000 mile journey. He joined a party of overlanders, who mostly walked alongside their wagons across the high plains of north eastern Kansas, before following the south fork of the Platte River.

Five hundred miles in 40 days was slow but safer than attempting the journey alone, but at the fur trading post of Fort Laramie, Robert joined a group of men on horseback who wanted to get to California fast and fill their hats with gold before it ran out.

He saw a drunken Sioux at the Fort and was not impressed, but the savages who attacked them on the second day of their journey west were a different breed. They were aloof, arrogant and terrifying. Big Tom Black said they were Cheyenne and, as he was the only one of them with frontier experience, they accepted his word and his guidance.

Big Tom had his horse killed from under him and three of the party stopped to help without realising the consequence. Robert fired one of his pistols and dropped the other and then he and his horse panicked. He, and the five men who were left, put their mounts to the gallop and he drew his father's sabre and slashed at a savage who came screaming across his way. He felt the blade cut into flesh but did not stop to see its effect.
At night, they rested their horses only briefly and began walking them before dawn and it was never a consideration to wait or go back for survivors, for they knew there would be none.

Sam Kelly, a former sergeant in the British Army, took charge and was dubbed Captain Kelly. He had a natural authority but not much in common with the wilderness. Three more of the group died on the journey before Captain Kelly led Robert and Joshua Campbell, a 17-year-old carpenter from Michigan, down through the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas.

They inspected the diggings and the Captain decided to take his new commission south to Mexico where, it was rumoured, there was always financially rewarding employment for trained soldiers.

Robert and Joshua panned for gold through the winter rain and mud. For almost five months, Robert felt as if he was living under water. He pulled on soggy clothes at daybreak and worked in the wet as long as the light allowed, scooping earth and washing it in the river for signs of gold, before returning to their tent in the dark. They ate beans, potatoes and bread and drank coffee and lived in hope.

In forty nine, the first prospectors arrived by sea. The two young men had collected a modest poke and they invested in new shirts, trousers and boots. In the fast growing town of Stockton, their affluence, and the bag of gold they carried, was noticed by a group of newcomers, soft from their sea journey.
Robert and Joshua did not correct the impression that the gold was the result of a pleasant week's work rather than five months' hard toil. The newcomers offered to buy their diggings and the two youths reluctantly agreed and, with the profits, quickly left the district.

Business, Robert decided, was a preferable way of making money than living under water on a bad diet. He and Joshua opened a general store in the mining camp of Red Dog, with Joshua building the frame front himself. They made money at a better rate than digging for it and, being dry and comfortable, were less inclined to drown their sorrows by spending what they earned in the saloon tents.

They expanded into a haulage business and supplied goods to other camps and instant towns whose names aptly summed up the conditions: Git-Up-And-Git, Hell's Delight, Skunk Gulch and Hangtown, where a lynch mob had instigated justice early. Punishments handed out at drumhead courts ranged from whipping to ear cropping to hanging. In consequence, the towns were wild but reasonably law abiding.

Red Dog was a rough place and Robert didn’t contradict the story of cool heroism that Josh told about him, how he led a charge of frontiersmen through a war band of savages, slashing a path to safety with his sabre. After all, it was almost true and his scar gave credence to previous battle honours.
He kept the sabre hanging in the store as a reminder to customers to keep good order. He had to use it when two miners, drunk at 10 in the morning, turned awkward in an argument over their bill. One pulled a knife and, as they spilled through the front door and onto the dirt street, he rendered him unconscious with a blow to the side of the head with the flat of the blade.

His associate pulled a gun and fired once, scorching Robert's ribs and damaging a perfectly good shirt, and Robert slashed in self-defence and severed an artery in the man's neck and he died after a spectacular gush of blood.

A Miners' Association jury was gathered to pass judgement on the death and Robert was exonerated of any guilt and the surviving miner was given a public whipping for instigating the incident.

The verdict eased his conscience. He also realised that while a sabre might have made his reputation, a handgun might prove to be a more useful weapon and he equipped himself with one of the new six shot revolvers made by Samuel Colt. He wore it in a holster on his belt, as much for show as trouble.

He was glad he had it when the whipped miner came looking for revenge one night and tried to shoot him near a saloon tent. The man might have had better luck if he had attempted the assassination prior to visiting the saloon instead of after; as it was, his aim was defective and he killed a mule. Robert drew his own weapon and shot the man dead with a bullet in the chest.

His reputation was confirmed, he was declared a hero and the owner of the dead mule insisted on buying him a drink, after recovering the cost of replacing the animal from the pockets of the deceased miner.

The diggings proved rich and prices of essential commodities went up. Kentucky Bourbon was $30 a quart, eggs $50 a dozen, coffee $5 a pound and boots $100 a pair. They made money at a handsome rate and their stack of gold dust in doeskin bags accumulated steadily, but Robert was impatient. Besides, he was getting bored with the dirt and the mud and the predominantly male company whose idea of leisure on a Sunday was horse racing, gambling, drinking and hunting for a prostitute.

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