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  To Lynn

  The planter, the farmer, the mechanic, and the laborer all know that their success depends upon their own industry and economy, and that they must not expect to become suddenly rich by the fruits of their toil.

  —President Andrew Jackson, 1837

  A frenzy seized my soul; piles of gold rose up before me at every step; castles of marble;… slaves bowing to my beck and call; virgins contending with each other for my love… in short, I had a very violent attack of the Gold Fever.

  —James Carson, a soldier stationed in California, 1848

  PROLOGUE

  A BANDONED BY HIS COMPANIONS, starving, and trapped by snowstorms high in the Sierra Nevada, even a pathologically optimistic man like J. Goldsborough Bruff found himself fretting. He had thought he could outlast the cold and snow until a rescue party turned up, but months had passed. Now he could scarcely muster the strength to stumble in search of food.

  Dinner one night had consisted of candles melted in a skillet, and, another night, boiled woodpecker. A few days later, Bruff found a half-decayed deer’s skull; the worms and bugs had left a bit of meat, and Bruff shared it with his faithful dog, a bull terrier named Nevada. (The scraps, Bruff conceded in his diary, “would have been, probably, in different circumstances, quite disgusting!”) That was breakfast on April 1, 1850. It marked a step up from another recent meal, coffee grounds with salt. To keep his spirits up, Bruff recited over and over, “I will soon have plenty to eat! Bread and meat, coffee and milk! A house to sleep in! An end of my sufferings!”

  Back at home, he had entertained more extravagant fantasies. Bruff was an architectural draftsman from Washington, D.C., with a wife, a houseful of children, a secure job, and a thirst for adventure. In 1849, no one in the East could talk of anything but the gold strike in California. For weeks, Bruff listened and pondered and sat awake late at night studying guidebooks. Finally, his mind made up, he shoved his sharpened pencils aside. Soon he had organized a company of sixty-six men and seventeen mule-drawn wagons. The party sported dashing uniforms, new weapons, and a suitably imposing name.

  On April 2, 1849, with Bruff at their head, the Washington City and California Mining Association marched to the White House to meet the president. Then they headed for California and a life of ease and luxury.

  Almost exactly a year later, Bruff gathered his strength for a final attempt at escaping the mountains. Staggering his way, falling to the ground every few steps, he inched along. He ate the last of his candles. He gave the wick to Nevada.

  PART I

  HOPE

  CHAPTER ONE

  A CRACK IN TIME

  IN AMERICA IN THE mid-1800s, everyone knew that two laws governed the world. First, the path to success was long and difficult; the race was not to the swift but to the diligent, who collected their pennies day after day. Second, calamity came in countless guises and swooped down without warning. Jobs, savings, and homes could vanish overnight. In the Panic of 1837, a forerunner of the Great Depression, meat doubled in price; so did flour. Nearly half the banks in the country failed. President Martin Van Buren, who rejected any efforts by the government to ease the crisis as “effeminate indulgence,” came to be known as Martin Van Ruin. In eastern cities, one man in three was unemployed, and crowds of rioters shouted, “Bread! Bread! Bread!” Tens of thousands of hungry, homeless New Yorkers wandered the city’s streets.

  Private disasters struck as broadly and haphazardly as public ones. In an age with no understanding of germs or bacteria or infection, disease ran unchecked. Doctors had little to offer their patients but kind words and dubious potions. Mothers and fathers watched helplessly as scarlet fever or whooping cough or measles picked off one of their children, and then another, and then another. Parents who had not seen a child die were unusually fortunate.

  Amputations and other operations were ordeals that looked like scenes from Edgar Allan Poe. Surgeons operated in blood-soaked frock coats and, in the interest of speed, held their knives in their teeth as they switched between cutting and sawing. Every family had seen mishaps turn into calamities. In 1842 Henry Thoreau’s brother nicked himself while shaving; in a week lockjaw set in, and spasms and convulsions racked his body; in another three days he was dead. The powerful and prominent were as vulnerable as everyone else. William Henry Harrison, elected president in 1840, delivered a two-hour-long inaugural address on a cold, rainy day, without a coat. He caught pneumonia. The best doctors in the land bled him and blistered him and plied him with castor oil, opium, wine, and brandy. To no avail. Harrison died a month after taking office.

  Sanitation was primitive, and diseases like dysentery reigned on a throne of filth. Cholera, the most feared killer of the age, cut down whole swathes of the population at a stroke. Like AIDS in the twentieth century, it seemed to come out of nowhere and to kill gruesomely and agonizingly, with a special taste for young and healthy victims. “King Cholera,” the nineteenth century called it, or sometimes simply “The Monster.” Victims were “one moment warm, palpitating, human organisms,” reported the London Medical Gazette, “the next a sort of galvanized corpses, with icy breath, stopped pulse, and blood congealed—blue, shrivelled up, convulsed.”

  The cholera epidemic that hit the United States in 1832 gained strength all through the 1830s and ’40s. In Saint Louis, a major gathering spot for emigrants heading to California to find gold, cholera killed six thousand people in a single year, almost one-tenth the population. In response to the crisis, the government could only declare a national day of prayer “to implore the Almighty in His own good time to stay the destroying hand which is now lifted up against us.” People cowered in horror or fled in terror. Many victims had been healthy at breakfast and dead by dinner.

  What no one in the 1840s knew—because no one had ever experienced such a thing—was that life-changing, fantastic-as-a-fairy-tale good news could arrive just as suddenly as disaster. Then, in December, 1848, came the most startling message imaginable. In far-off California, the president of the United States proclaimed, gold had fallen from the sky! Hesitant to believe at first, Americans eventually gathered their nerve and gave way to hope.

  Most people had heard of fortunes won and lost, in commercial investments or in real estate speculation, but only a handful of wheeler-dealers played those heady games. For ordinary Americans, the ecstatic talk of gold and sudden riches was new and shocking and overwhelmingly exciting. They had dreamed and fantasized, of course, but those dreams had always been refuges from real life, not genuine possibilities. Now this!

  We can hardly imagine their vulnerability. Today, we have been inoculated with cynicism; our forebears had far less experience of hopes raised sky-high and then dashed. In 1849, when headlines shouted “Gold fever!,” the epidemic roared through American cities and villages. Victims fell in droves. In households across the nation, and across the world, the same dreams beckoned and the same debates took place. Is it real? Can it be? Do we dare?

  For us, it is inevitably a poignant story, for it is a tale of youthful hope and fervor. America itself was young, and so were most of the gold-seekers. We look at them with a mix of envy and condescension, like middle-aged wedding
guests contemplating the unlined faces of an impossibly youthful bride and groom.

  The goal in 1849 was not so much the prestige and visibility that a fortune would bring as the freedom that a fortune represented. Sometimes the dreamers spoke in flowery language. “Being a shoemaker,” one young man later recalled, “and ambitious to rise somewhat over the bench, it is no wonder that the discovery of gold in California excited my fancy and hopes; believing that the celebrated Golden Age had arrived at last… I joined a respectable company going to the promised land.”

  Sometimes the language was heartbreakingly plain. “Jane i left you and them boys for no other reason than this to come here to procure a little property by the swet of my brow so that we could have a place of our own that i mite not be a dog for other people any longer.”

  Always the message was the same: The world could change. Indeed, the world had changed. Farmers plodding behind a plow, like their fathers and their fathers’ fathers before them, could break free. Clerks locked inside an office, condemned to decades of copying wills and contracts, could win a future as bright as that of any planter’s son. At last, astonishingly, for once, there was a way out.

  The story is set in America, and it is, in important aspects, the American story. Many of the great themes play out on center stage—the journey west in search of a better life; the collision between races and nationalities; the ingrained faith that tomorrow will vastly outshine today; the focus on material success; the omnipresent, taken-for-granted violence; the proud belief that America is the land of the self-made man who rises by virtue of luck and pluck rather than blood or birth.

  In the sense that California is like the rest of America, only more so, the gold rush is the American story, only more so.

  The news of California’s gold, free for all, arrived unbidden in a world that could scarcely make sense of it. America had its rich men in 1848, though they were rare. (A new word, “millionaire,” had crept into the language a few years before, to describe the handful of fur barons and real estate tycoons at the peak of the economic pyramid. In the 1840s New York City was home to about ten of these exotic creatures.)* Few who were not born to wealth would ever attain it.

  In the mid-nineteenth century, most Americans worked twelve hours a day, six days a week. Life was hemmed in and hard. A factory girl in a cotton mill might earn $2.50 for her seventy-two-hour week, a cook in a restaurant perhaps $2 a day, a ditchdigger $1. In a society still dominated by agriculture, most boys and men labored in the fields, and girls and women cooked, cleaned, and looked after the children. Young men and women who fled home in search of independence and opportunity often found work in mills or factories. A fortunate few made it into offices, where the work was likely just as dull but better paid and less dangerous.

  In its early, preindustrial years, American life had inched its way along. When the nation’s first newspaper was founded, in 1690, the publisher promised his readers that his paper would be “furnished once a month (or if any Glut of occurrences happen, oftener).” But the first half of the nineteenth century was an era of enormous progress, the newfangled locomotive roaring down the track its perfect emblem. In 1830 the United States had only twenty miles of track; by 1836 that number had soared to twelve hundred miles. The clang of sledgehammer on railroad spikes rang out in countless fields and valleys that once had known only birdsong. Workmen cleared thousands of miles of roads and carved a vast network of canals. Trains sped between cities, telegraphs flashed news bulletins across hundreds of miles, and flickering gaslights brightened the streets. Posh hotels and wealthy homes boasted indoor plumbing and central heating.

  The new nation itself, in the meantime, had grown at a rate scarcely known in history, doubling in size with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, and then, in the 1840s, tacking on another million-plus square miles in the West and Northwest. A country that at its birth had clung to the Atlantic Seaboard now sprawled across a continent. The population had skyrocketed, too, doubling every two decades and pushing ever westward. The economy had grown even faster than that (though the rich gained ground faster than the poor).

  The gold rush took that energy and multiplied it many times over, jamming into a few years events that might have unrolled over the course of decades. In 1848, San Francisco’s population numbered a mere 812. By 1851, that village had grown into a rollicking city of thirty thousand, clamorous with the growl and lilt of a dozen languages. “I am among the French and Dutch and Scotch and Jews and Italians and Swedes and Chinese and Indians and all manner of tongues and nations,” one new arrival marveled in a letter home.

  Change in the 1840s was most visible in New York City, already the biggest city in the United States, and a raucous, filthy, thrilling hybrid of a medieval village and a modern metropolis. Life played out at high speed and high volume—thousands of horse-drawn wagons with iron-rimmed wheels clattered down stone streets, newsboys shouted out headlines promising gore and scandal, pigs squealed, street vendors hawked apples, nuts, eels, and oysters. The subway and Central Park and the Brooklyn Bridge were still decades in the future, but Wall Street and Broadway and Fifth Avenue were already famous. Businessmen hurtled along, elbows churning, intent on the next deal. “A New York merchant,” one visitor wrote, “always walks as if he had a good dinner before him, and a bailiff behind him.”

  Some canny entrepreneurs made fortunes by creating refuges from the chaos. In 1846, on Broadway, Alexander Stewart opened the nation’s first department store, a five-story, marble-clad temple to commerce. Light spilled in through plate-glass windows and a domed skylight, caressing two acres of carefully arranged merchandise. Customers marveled at another innovation—all Stewart’s goods carried “regular and uniform prices,” fixed in advance. In this elegant new bazaar, no one bargained or haggled. Clerks by the dozen stood ready to offer quiet help. Meanwhile, hotels competed to outpamper their clients. Restaurants popped up by the hundreds. The most expensive offered refinements of breathtaking elegance—individual tables, tablecloths, and, most startlingly, menus. In a world of boardinghouses and communal meals, this was splendor.

  But not everyone had a place at the feast, and even some who did found their appetites sharpened rather than satisfied by the endless talk of ever-advancing prosperity. (“A few are riding,” Thoreau snapped bitterly, “but the rest are run over.”) By history’s calendar, these transformations took place at lightning speed; but men and women lived day to day or week to week, not generation to generation. They yearned for change, they heard of change all around them, but they did not know if they could find a way to change their own lives.

  For black Americans in particular, change seemed not the impossible-to-miss theme of the age but a hoax or a pipe dream. It was slavery, above all other factors, that marked the world of the mid-1800s as unthinkably different from our own. America just before the Civil War was a land in which nearly four million people lived in bondage. In South Carolina and Mississippi, over half the population was in chains.

  Behind every such statistic lay a multitude of anguished lives. In April, 1854, in Charlottesville, Virginia, the owners of a seventeen-year-old slave girl named Frances gave her a letter to deliver to a business firm in Richmond. (Frances could not read.) “She does not know that she is to be sold,” the note explained. “I could not tell her; I own all her family, and the leave-taking would be so distressing that I could not. Please say to her that that was my reason, and that I was compelled to sell her to pay for the horses that I have bought… and to build my stable. I believe I have said all that is necessary, but I am so nervous that I hardly know what I have written.”

  Life for whites was vastly better than that, but even for most of them, the sight of progress all around served mainly as a reminder of what they did not yet have. “I have followed that plow more miles than any one man ever did,” one Connecticut farmer lamented, and his counterparts in the nation’s cities felt their own version of the same anguish.

  In New York, in 1
844, tailors went on strike to demand a pay raise, to seventy-five cents a day, for their ten to fifteen hours of work. (After five weeks, they won the raise.) In Nashville, Tennessee, in 1847, carpenters called for a shorter working day, a mere ten hours. “We are flesh and blood, we need hours of recreation,” they implored. “… Shall we live and die knowing nothing but the rudiments of our trade?” New York swarmed with beggars and ragpickers who scavenged garbage heaps for anything salvageable, or edible. Hot-corn girls worked the crowds, calling out their melancholy singsong:

  Hot corn! Hot corn!

  Here’s your lily-white corn.

  All you that’s got money

  Poor me that’s got none—

  Buy me lily-white corn

  And let me go home.

  This was a society with scarcely any safety nets. “In 1840,” the historian Andrew Delbanco observed, “the horse pulling a rich man’s carriage down Broadway could expect to sleep that night in better quarters than the man who knocks on the carriage door begging for a coin.” To fall sick or get hurt or lose a job was to plummet from a tightrope into an abyss. In such a fast-growing, fast-changing economy, new opportunities constantly arose and old certainties fell apart. In the long run, American ingenuity would enrich the world, and improvements in the plow, the sewing machine, and the steam engine would create jobs, not destroy them. In the short run, the price of wheat or whale oil could fall; new ways of stitching shoes or mining coal or printing news could render old skills instantly obsolete; lone craftsmen could be steamrolled by giant mills employing squadrons of low-paid factory girls.

  In this precarious world, fear tended to overshadow hope. The message that each generation tried to drum into the heads of the next was to make peace with the grim facts of reality. “All communities divide themselves into the few and the many,” Alexander Hamilton had written at the time of America’s birth. The few were “rich and well born,” and the many “the mass of the people.” So it had always been; so it would always be. Who could dispute so plain a truth? The path of wisdom was not to shake one’s fist against fate but to accommodate oneself to it. Through repetition and familiarity, old maxims had long since taken on the power of incantations. Work hard. Save your money. Pray for the best. Dreams were a foolish indulgence, distractions in a dangerous world. Dreams of riches were the most foolish of all.