I received an email from K, who had been mucking around Buoyantville's archives, which asked me what was happening with the madcap novel I had outlined to write; some fragments of which can be found strewn here and there. Now I had put all that business in abeyance, unsure if I have skills and cunning I would require to pull it off, and also because I had (and have) doubts as to if the stuff I want to talk about is of interest to anyone at all. But K's email made me go back to the some of the source material I had scavenged online to provide historical scaffolding that would support my tales.

One of these historical sources is the California As I Saw It" section of the extensive American Memory project set up by The Library of Congress. This section, as its subtitle "First-Person Narratives of California's Early Years, 1849-1900 " indicates, has various fascinating narratives on living and dying in what are essentially the Gold Rush years in California. And among all these narratives, a simple textual search brings up only one in which a desi, or a Hindu appears; that of Friedrich Gerstäcker's "Scenes of life in California".

As the Foreword to this book puts it, Herr. Gerstäcker was some kind of a German Bruce Chatwin of the 19th century. For example it says: "In 1849 Gerstäcker undertook a new voyage with the double purpose of collecting information for the use of emigrants and for new material for his books. This time financial troubles were greatly lessened for he was subsidized by the “Reichsmenesterium zu Frankfurt.” He went to Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Valparaiso, and to California, returning to Germany in 1852 by way of the Sandwich and Society Islands, Australia and the Dutch Indies. His accounts of these new travels appeared in Ausland and in another journal published at Augsburg. Later they were collected into book form, some of which were translated into English. In 1860 he visited the German colonies in South American in the interests of further immigration. His last visit to North America was in 1867 and 1868 in which again he went to South America." In this California book, Gerstäcker chronicled his experiences as a miner, and later as a merchandiser with other Germans in the middle of the California Gold Rush.

In two chapters titled "The Hindu" and "The Chase of The Indians", Gerstäcker records incidents triggered by the appearance of a Hindu, who makes the claim of having being robbed by the Indians of nineteen thousand dollars worth of gold dust. This triggers the greed of the whites in the mining camps, and they set off to retrieve this gold for themselves. In this process, they shoot an Indian as well as burn down their camp. Only later do they realize that the Hindu was a liar, and bring him to the rough frontier court. To further discover how the Hindu’s claims are unraveled, and how justice worked in the Wild Wild West, go take a look at these two fascinating narratives.