Wilbur and the Gold Rush

You’ve been getting a steady diet of politics and current events, so I thought we’d lighten it up and do a human-interest story. In 1853, in Sutter’s Mill, California at the height of the gold rush, an old prospector who’d been out in the wild, working his claim for over a year, came down out of the hills and found a little town. The town wasn’t much, just a dusty, ramshackle collection of a few buildings nailed together out of scrap lumber with more stray dogs than people on the street. But one of the buildings had a faded sign in red letters that said, LIQUOR, so the prospector tied his pack mule to the hitching post and went inside. The bartender was fat man with a bushy beard, green teeth, and a pair of Ben Franklin eyeglasses dirtier than the sign on the front door. Sitting a few stools down the bar was a little man, filthy dirty with a wild beard and hair and a stench that dominated the bar. “Don’t mind him,” the bartender said, “that’s just Wilbur, he lives in a packing crate behind the saloon.”  After a couple shots of some kind of rot gut whiskey, the prospector asked him, “Don’t you have any women around here?” “Naw,” the bartender replied, “we had a couple of ‘em awhile back, but one of ‘em died of the cholera and the other run off with a snake oil salesman from Illinois.” “Damn”, the prospector muttered, “so what do you do when you want a woman?” “We just use Wilbur,” the bartender replied with a shrug. “Nope, no way, I ain’t into that shit,” the prospector said, downing another shot. Two shots later, he asked the bartender, “so, if I did do this with him, who’d know?” The bartender scratched his beard and said, “well, there’d only be you, me, Wilbur and the other two guys…” “What other two guys?” the prospector asked. The bartender smiled, “the other two guys you’re gonna’ hire to hold Wilbur down, he ain’t into that shit, either….”