Frank Ross’s Gold Pieces Symbol Analysis

Because Mattie wants to recover everything Chaney stole from her father, the two pieces of California gold the outlaw took from Frank’s “trouser band” come to represent her undying desire to rectify her loss. Although the gold pieces are certainly less important to her than the idea of catching Chaney himself, she thinks rather frequently about finding them. After her first encounter with Lucky Ned Pepper’s gang of bandits, she actually finds one of the pieces of gold, thereby enjoying a brief moment of triumph. However, she doesn’t ever manage to track down the other one, even after killing Chaney. “I will say here that Judy was never recovered, nor was the second California gold piece,” she writes at the end of the novel. “I kept the other one for years, until our house burned. We found no trace of it in the ashes.” Combined with her failure to recover the final piece of gold, the fact that she eventually loses the one she did find suggests that it’s impossible for a person to make up for true emotional loss with material goods. In other words, securing one of her father’s gold pieces does nothing to make up for the fact that Frank Ross is dead. In turn, the gold pieces symbolize not only Mattie’s quest to rectify what happened to her father, but the notion that it’s not necessarily possible to ever fully recover from a profound personal loss.