It wasn’t that Dad had anything against my project that he’d instigated to get me, and my motor mouth, out of his hair for a while. The first problem was that I’d built my building on the screened-in back porch, where the cats had no hope of reaching. The second concern was that I’d nailed it to the floor right in front of his brand new cream separator. I’m certain he envisioned me inviting a hoard of hairball spittin’ critters inside to dwell within their new domain—right next to the cream separator. Oh, those cats would have loved that, but not my dad.
But down on the farm, and moving west, cats were a necessary fact of life unless the poor pioneer wanted their entire store of grain and other food items desecrated and devoured. Strange as it may seem cats even joined in the California Gold Rush back in the 1860s. That quickly over populated place called San Francisco had its own troubles with the devious little rodent called the mouse. The situation was so desperate that one enterprising fellow went back east, crated up a boat load of cat and sailed away around the horn back to sunny California. There, in San Francisco, he sold every one of those cats, and for a handsome profit at that.
Cats were headed west, however, long before the miners started sinking pick and shovel into the Sierra foothills. Back in the early spring of 1812 another enterprising fellow by the name of Manuel Lisa took off from St. Louis with twenty-five men. They were headed up the Missouri River in one of the best barges that had ever ascended that muddy waterway. They weren’t out to find the kind of gold that glitters, but another equally at the time valuable source of security—beaver pelts.
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