conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a story titled After the Gold Rush about Colorado, Randall, Texas with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Dramas & Plays.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author was born in Fort Riley, Kansas and is the son of an Army officer. He lived on military bases in Wisconsin, Texas and Colorado before moving to Germany in the late fifties with his parents and older brother. Randall attended Southern Colorado State College, now the University of Southern Colorado, where he received a B.S. in Geology. He also attended the University of Houston where he received a M.S. in Geology. Randall worked in a gold mine near Cripple Creek and lived in a log cabin, which he still owns, in Goldfield, Colorado. He later moved to Houston, Texas and worked selling seismic data to help geologists and geophysicists find oil and gas. He moved to Reno, Nevada to take a job with a Fortune 500 Company, which works with the gold mining industry in Nevada and he now works with a concrete company. Randall is currently completing a sequel to After the Gold Rush, which is titled A Drop in the Bucket. He is also working on novels about Cleopatra, Moses, the Ark of the Covenant and the Temple in Jerusalem. He is a devoted husband to his wife and is father to two daughters. Randall and his wife are members of a Presbyterian church in Reno.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a story about Red, Weather, American with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Short Stories & Anthologies?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this story could be 'After the Gold Rush'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: After the Gold Rush
  Deborah Dane was more than the perfect hostess. By the end of our conversation she was insisting I stay overnight in her house — not the Bed and Breakfast, but the small private residence newly erected at the back of The Parsonage. I protested my poverty but Debbie wanted no money.
  Bonnie, Brent and baby daughter Bethany welcomed me into the family home with open arms. Debbie's daughter and family were staying over on a flying visit from Indonesia, where they were missionaries. Bonnie was another formidable woman — an internationalist, at ease with and endlessly curious about travellers. It was too soon to tell if baby Bethany was blessed with the same forthright female genes, but she had mighty powerful lungs.
  I showered, treated myself to clean clothes and came downstairs to find I was included in the family's preparations for dinner. This was going too far, I graciously protested. Bonnie was only home for a couple of nights before the family began a tour of the States to raise funds for their Ecumenical mission in the Far East. With the pressures of the B & B, they would see little of mum. The least I could do was allow them quality time together.
  On the scrubbed streets of Nevada City the day-time clamour had been replaced by a sprinkling of overnight guests leisurely making their way between restaurants, bars and theatres. They were dressed casually but costly. I walked in the opposite direction, out of town, up to the Pioneer Cemetery on West Broad Street. On a grassy knoll overlooking a formal graveyard, a scattering of wooden crosses and small headboards poked out of the untended ground. A few headstones and slabs carried weathered inscriptions remembering people born in places an ocean away. Most died in the 1850s and all died young, the oldest making it to just thirty-two. It was a pitiful yet tranquil sight, possibly the only slice of history in Nevada City not smothered under treacle. Debbie told me the tour leaflet didn't explain that the cemetery at the foot of the knoll was Catholic. The Pioneer Cemetery was a bit of spare land where anybody who didn't bend a knee to Rome got dumped.
  I grabbed a bite at Friar Tuck's on the corner of Commercial Street, at the edge of the original Chinese quarter. The waitress was most impressed I came from the land of Robin Hood. "Y'mean, there actually was a Friar Tuck?" She had seen me earlier in the day sketching the ornate frontage of the National Hotel (built in 1854), and was herself a Gold Rush buff with hands-on experience.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me another paragraph.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: There was something odd about these children. Aside from anything else, they weren't whinging. Forty miles is a long way for the best behaved little legs, but what banter occurred between them revolved around identifying wayside plants. When Jim invited me to pitch in their garden for the night, curiosity got the better of my desire to have done with the argonaut's trail.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The best estimates suggest around $6 billion worth of gold was extracted from the sierras in the ten years of the bonanza, but only a fraction reached the United States Treasury. Almost a year elapsed between James Marshall finding gold and the first shipment arriving at the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia. While California pleaded for a mint to be built in the Far West, Washington remained unconvinced news of the find was any more than a ruse to lure settlers. Meanwhile, the bounty was being sent to Mexico, Peru and Chile for minting, sold at a price barely a quarter of its true value. During the one year when gold was being scooped out of Californian river beds by the sack full and traded at a pittance, the United States Treasury didn't see a bean. While Washington was 'slumbering', gold to the value of as much as $15 million a day was being weighed in on the other side of the country.
  For all the months spent in the saddle, I had seen neither hide nor hair of Californian gold. Of course I wasn't the only man who failed to catch a glimmer at the end of their 3,000 mile treasure hunt but, unlike my predecessors, I could cheat. On my first day back in the capital, I joined several thousand visitors pushing their way into the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. In the hope of finding a single lump of the sort of ore the Forty-Niners dug up, I jumped the orderly crocodile of families filing past the Hope Diamond, the Star of Bombay and numerous displays of colourful crystals. In a darkened corner, I discovered a row of yellow faces illuminated by the glow from a large cabinet containing twenty samples of sierra gold extracted between 1848 and 1852.
  The largest and heaviest piece was the size of a man's shoe, weighing a staggering 101.76 ounces. Next to it, another was the size and approximate shape of a child's pelvic girdle. It weighed in at 64.48 ounces. More than size and weight, it was the sheer beauty of the mineral which beguiled me. It wasn't difficult to appreciate why a man would want to bellow "Eureka!" from the highest mountain after prizing one of these exotic specimens from the drab earth. Regardless of it's monetary value, the extraordinary appearance of raw gold was enough to trigger euphoria.
  Fiery as molten larva, each lump in the cabinet fitted into one of four character types. Some were smooth, like nuggets of yellow barbecue charcoal. Others were pitted like pumice stone. One or two reminded me of folded pastry which had dried out, curled and cracked at the edges. The most spectacular were like congealed lumps of jumbo sized Corn Flakes which had been scraped up, leaving jagged holes where some of the flakes remained stuck to the bowl. They were all a brassy gold, with deep shadows of rose gold merging into hues of orange and daffodil yellow. They were exquisite and I drooled. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed an attendant studying me, suspicious of the time I was spending leaning against the cabinet.
  I pushed my way out of the building against the flow of tourists and plonked myself on the bench beside the steps of the museum. My cheeks felt flushed and my temples throbbed. Somewhat late, I had gone down with a touch of gold fever.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Almost a year elapsed between James Marshall finding gold and the first shipment arriving at the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia. While California pleaded for a mint to be built in the Far West, Washington remained unconvinced news of the find was any more than a ruse to lure settlers. Meanwhile, the bounty was being sent to Mexico, Peru and Chile for minting, sold at a price barely a quarter of its true value. During the one year when gold was being scooped out of Californian river beds by the sack full and traded at a pittance, the United States Treasury didn't see a bean. While Washington was 'slumbering', gold to the value of as much as $15 million a day was being weighed in on the other side of the country.
  For all the months spent in the saddle, I had seen neither hide nor hair of Californian gold. Of course I wasn't the only man who failed to catch a glimmer at the end of their 3,000 mile treasure hunt but, unlike my predecessors, I could cheat. On my first day back in the capital, I joined several thousand visitors pushing their way into the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. In the hope of finding a single lump of the sort of ore the Forty-Niners dug up, I jumped the orderly crocodile of families filing past the Hope Diamond, the Star of Bombay and numerous displays of colourful crystals. In a darkened corner, I discovered a row of yellow faces illuminated by the glow from a large cabinet containing twenty samples of sierra gold extracted between 1848 and 1852.
  The largest and heaviest piece was the size of a man's shoe, weighing a staggering 101.76 ounces. Next to it, another was the size and approximate shape of a child's pelvic girdle. It weighed in at 64.48 ounces. More than size and weight, it was the sheer beauty of the mineral which beguiled me. It wasn't difficult to appreciate why a man would want to bellow "Eureka!" from the highest mountain after prizing one of these exotic specimens from the drab earth. Regardless of it's monetary value, the extraordinary appearance of raw gold was enough to trigger euphoria.
  Fiery as molten larva, each lump in the cabinet fitted into one of four character types. Some were smooth, like nuggets of yellow barbecue charcoal. Others were pitted like pumice stone. One or two reminded me of folded pastry which had dried out, curled and cracked at the edges. The most spectacular were like congealed lumps of jumbo sized Corn Flakes which had been scraped up, leaving jagged holes where some of the flakes remained stuck to the bowl. They were all a brassy gold, with deep shadows of rose gold merging into hues of orange and daffodil yellow. They were exquisite and I drooled. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed an attendant studying me, suspicious of the time I was spending leaning against the cabinet.
  I pushed my way out of the building against the flow of tourists and plonked myself on the bench beside the steps of the museum. My cheeks felt flushed and my temples throbbed. Somewhat late, I had gone down with a touch of gold fever.