The Doubloon Trade

In 1854 I converted Spanish gold into Arizona land.

The doubloons had been in a leather satchel since the Nassau years: small coins, the 2-escudo size, each one seven grams and bearing a dead king’s face on one side and a cross on the other. I had taken them from Spanish treasure ships across nearly thirty years of working the Sanguine Judge, one prize at a time. They were not the largest portion of my wealth by 1854; they were the oldest, and I had kept them because they were small enough to move, and because there is something about holding the things you survived in your hand that makes the surviving feel more real.

America had just purchased a large piece of northern Mexico, including the town of Tucson, and the Southern Pacific Railroad was going to need to go somewhere west, and I had heard, through the particular channels available to someone in my position, where it was planning to go.

I bought land along the planned route. I bought it through a blood-bound agent whose name I have since forgotten, paid in Spanish doubloons converted to current tender at considerable advantage to the counterparties, who were not in a position to ask where the gold had come from. I sold much of that land to the railroads at a profit that would have made Mango’s takes look modest.

I said to Sings, when we rode into Arizona on the survey road, that I had gone from a pirate on the open seas to a pirate of the rail lines. She gave me the look she reserved for things that were true but not entirely to her credit. It was one of her finer expressions. I have missed it for a hundred and fifty years.

Tucson was going to be the rail junction. That meant Tucson was going to be everything that followed from a rail junction: commerce, population, investment, the particular gravity of a place that all roads and rails feed into. I understood this with the absolute clarity of someone who had been watching cities grow from scratch since before the country that contained them existed.

I put most of the remaining doubloons into the Tucson property holdings and kept a few back. Some of those coins are still in my study. Seven grams each. A dead king. A cross.

They have outlasted him. They have outlasted most things.

So have I.

Sings rode beside me into Tucson and I showed her what I had arranged and she said nothing for a long while, looking at the desert and the mountains and the particular quality of light in that place. Then she said it was good country. She said it with the weight of someone who had been measuring country her whole life and knew the difference between good and merely adequate.

I agreed.

We stayed.