Thursday, February 10, 2005

Your Ancestry, Back In The Gold Rush Day

Your Ancestry, Back In The Gold Rush Day!

The only reason you're alive today is because your great great great great grandmother Ginny Rae Kale was a whore. She lived in the long-forgotten town of Riverbed, California. Ginny Rae Kale was one of the thousands of folks who kept going west until they dropped, and where they dropped was home. Civilization sprang up in those days because people had to stop moving to keep their children alive.

Riverbed, California, it turned out, had quite a generous reserve of gold just underneath the dust. Just about everyone who settled there dug up enough riches to set them up for life. A few left town, but most stayed, trying to build on their fortunes. It didn't take long for word to spread about Riverbed. And it didn't take long for desperate crews of gold chasers to come into town and kill everyone in sight.

In those days, once most of the gold had been dug out of America, the people who'd already made it rich were growing poor again. When they got their first rocks, they opened for business, hiring a team of diggers thinking they'd just become a precious metals empire. Of course, they often found out a little too late that gold likes to gather in small crowds, and by the time they set to hunting down new mines to dig in, they'd already spent the majority of their fortunes. Faced with ruin, many took to stealing from others who'd struck gold.

Riverbed was raided ten times over while Ginny Rae Kale lived there. Crews would come in on horseback and shoot their way to the rightful ownership of every last chunk of gold hidden at the bottom of every mother's pillowcase. The crews shot first, hunted for the secreted gold second. But when they saw Ginny Rae Kale, they put their guns down and forced themselves upon her. After the first or second raid, she stopped resisting and started introducing herself as the town whore. A whore doesn't get raped, she gets paid. And no one would dare shoot the only whore in town, especially a whore with eyes like Ginny Rae Kale had. She was considered just as valuable a resource as the shiny rock buried underneath the soil.

The gold that had been dug up from the town must have changed hands ten times with the raids. A crew would come in, kill, and then settle to digging for all that nothing that was left over. Then the next crew would shoot down the last and pull up stakes. Ginny birthed six children, all of whom left her behind once they were old enough to split. Those six babies begat your family line, spreading your lineage through Oregon, into Georgia, and up into Pennsylvania.

Your heritage is traced back to the bed of a whore. Explains a lot.

Happy Your Ancestry, Back In The Gold Rush Day!