The Story
THEIR VERSION: Lawrence Richard Ives made the family filthy rich. He was also a cold-blooded sociopath who may have murdered his business partner.
• • • HER VERSION: It’s not that they were wrong exactly. It’s just that they’re answering the wrong question.
Lawrence Richard Ives made the family rich. Who cares? That’s not a story. It’s an event.
Even the how isn’t all that interesting. And yet countless writers over the last century have cataloged that information, again and again, like somehow it could add up to a full picture.
The what: The eighth-born son of two destitute farmers in Dillon Springs, Pennsylvania, makes a fortune prospecting out west.
The how: He spends every penny he makes on more land, more equipment, more smelting, more miners, more hotels in every soon-to-be- booming town along the trail of the so-called gold rush.
The interesting question, the interesting answer, is almost always the why.
That’s why we read these celebrity tell-alls, isn’t it? That’s why we pore over cold cases. We want to understand why things happen. We want it all to make sense.
The reason Lawrence Richard Ives got rich wasn’t because of a knack for business. It was because he was hungry. Because he was born in the
harsh winter of 1830 on a failing farm, the eighth of ten children.
By adulthood, there would be only six.
The world is cruel and dangerous, and Lawrence learned this, death by death.
The worst was his younger brother, Dicky, lost in the woods one winter, taken by frostbite. Lawrence was only nine when it happened, but he felt responsible. That was how it worked in large families like his. Each sibling looked after the one who came along next.
He expected his mother and father to blame him, the way he blamed
himself.
They didn’t.
This was when Lawrence realized the awful truth. His parents hardly felt Dicky’s loss, because they hardly knew him. Just as they hardly knew Lawrence. They were spread too thin, worked too hard. They were too tired to love.
The only people on this earth to whom Lawrence truly mattered—the only people who loved him as he loved them—were his younger brother and sister. And now one of them was gone, the other growing hungrier and gaunter by the day, the light seeping out of her large brown eyes, bit by precious bit.
He worried endlessly. If he let her down…if he lost her too, then what was the point of it all? All the hurt and pain that came with surviving would be for nothing if he couldn’t keep her safe.
Lawrence was nineteen the first time he heard about the gold, from a young local miner named Thomas Dougherty. About places out west where you couldn’t dig three feet without striking metal. About cities that were always warm, and men who’d never be hungry or cold again.
He tried to brush the stories off.
Fantasy, he told himself. A word that had no purpose in his world.
During the day, he was a pragmatist. At night, though, he dreamed.
Of gold. Of finding it in the fallow fields and the collapsing barn, and then, finally, in the sunlit creek he and Dicky used to wade through in the summers when they were small. Dicky was there too sometimes, still and
forever the little boy Lawrence had failed to protect, and when he plucked a stone that glistened like honey from beneath the water, he held it out to Lawrence with an awed expression. Look, Lawrie, he said, a magic rock.
In the dreams, Lawrence wept from relief. He knew it meant that they were saved.
He awoke crushed by reality. His brother was still gone. His sister was still starving.
After a week of dreaming, he left with Thomas for California. For the next eight years, they worked on a fourteen-person crew, digging up the occasional bits of quartz.
They’d make some money, then use it to move on and reinvest in a new mine. The more money they made, the less work Thomas and Lawrence had to do. Their job, primarily, became choosing new investments, buying up land or mines, then taking the largest cut of whatever was found there. Or better yet, proving it had metal and then selling it at a vast profit. It was a gamble, but Lawrence was good at it. Every dollar he made went right back home or else into the mines, to be multiplied.
And no matter how much they made, Lawrence’s hunger never abated.
Instead, it grew and grew. The more he had, the more he craved. The more he accumulated, the more there was to lose, and the terror of that never let up.
Then, one day, he and Thomas visited a slice of land in Nevada, and Lawrence just knew, could feel the metal calling out to him through the rock. Magic stone, exactly like he’d been dreaming of.
And rather than tell Thomas, he kept it to himself.
He told Thomas he was thinking of retiring, that that plot of land they’d gone to see was worthless and he was tired of the work, of moving around, finding the crews, chasing the next lode. And he was convincing enough that Thomas left, headed back toward California to assemble a new crew on more promising terrain.
Then Lawrence bought the mine, all by himself. Weeks later, his crew struck forty-two tons of silver ore.
The first thing Lawrence bought was the local inn. Because he knew that when the news about the silver hit, there’d be dozens more men— desperate men—coming to try their luck and they’d need someplace to eat, sleep, and spend.
He was right. Of course he was. He himself was a desperate man. He knew how they operated.
Several weeks later, Thomas heard what happened, and Lawrence Ives made another decision that would change the course of the family’s history forever.
