The Rush Read online

  There was no longer any grass, Lord noted, “but plenty of grasshoppers, and wild sage and crickets and horned toads.” Blessedly, though, there were no longer any mosquitoes. “The hum of their departing wings sounded a welcome jubilee to us, Lord wrote. “They followed and stuck by us faithfully to the last, but even musquitoes seem to have some sense, and cannot stand everything. I reckon they knew too much to come up here.”

  The reference to mosquitoes sounds like commonplace grousing, but it was far more important than that. Short-tempered though he was, Lord was not one to fuss. For him and the other gold-seekers, mosquitoes were not just a nuisance but a scourge. They swarmed “thick as snowflakes,” one emigrant wrote, and another reckoned them at “more than forty bushels to the acre, and of a very large breed.”

  Even gold rush diaries that skimmed by other miseries depicted mosquitoes as a special torment. “The mosquitoes swarm by the millions,” wrote George Thissell, a carriage-maker from Ohio. “They were nearly as large as Italian bees, and their bills more than a half inch long; with these they bored right through our blankets. The cattle could not feed or rest, and the captain called out a double guard.” Covered with bites that made them look as if they had measles, emigrants stumbled along under cheesecloth veils or smeared themselves with vinegar or oil or other concoctions in the hope it would serve as a repellent. Mostly they scratched and bled.

  Israel Lord, for once, kept his temper. “They are very great pests,” he noted simply, “and have caused me, at least, more trouble and suffering” than anything else on the trail. “Hunger, thirst, cholera, cold and heat may be endured or cured, musquitos never.”

  It was actually far worse than anyone in 1849 imagined, since no one then suspected any connection between mosquitoes and the diseases they carried. (Mosquitoes were not linked with yellow fever until 1881, nor with malaria until the 1890s.) Until the late 1800s, malaria in particular was all but universal throughout the middle band of the United States, all along the Mississippi River and its tributaries, from warm states like Louisiana to cold ones like Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.

  Ague or “intermittent fever,” as it was called, afflicted its victims with fevers, chills, and shivering fits. When he was a boy growing up in Missouri, Mark Twain would recall, everyone took bouts of sickness for granted. “Bear Creek… was a famous breeder of chills and fever in its day. I remember one summer when everybody in town had this disease at once. Many chimneys were shaken down, and all the houses were so racked that the town had to be rebuilt.” When Alonzo Delano met another gold-seeker, the two men quickly established that they both had lived in Indiana. “What part?” Delano asked. “Oh, from down on the Wabash, where they have the ague so bad it shakes the feathers off all the chickens.”

  The jokes were a brave response to what was deemed an unavoidable reality. “Chills and fever were believed part of frontier life, like hard work,” one historian observes. “Housewives learned to hurry through their work before sitting down to wait the daily attack; ministers scheduled their sermons for times when they would not have the shakes.”

  Gold rush diarists often skimmed by what was too commonplace to record, but Joseph Bruff, Israel Lord, Alonzo Delano, and nearly all their fellow emigrants wrestled with what Delano called “my old companions, chill and fever.” The only escape was escape, and part of California’s appeal, even in the years before anyone had heard of gold, was that it offered a refuge from disease.

  In 1840, Missourians had gathered eagerly around a fur trapper named Antoine Robideaux, newly back from the West. “There was but one man in California who ever had a chill there,” the trapper told his starry-eyed listeners, “and it was a matter of such wonderment that the people of Monterey went eighteen miles into the country to see him shake.”

  This alone was a prize worth a march across a continent. A land so blessed was almost as unimaginable as a land strewn with gold. When, later, it turned out that a single locale offered both health and wealth, Americans took it as tantamount to proof that they truly were God’s favorites.

  The notion that America had been chosen by God to carry out a special destiny was repeated endlessly in the 1840s, in every pulpit, lecture hall, and magazine. The United States was the most democratic of nations, the most egalitarian, the most open to talent and ambition, the fairest and freest, a light unto the world. The doctrine of manifest destiny—the term was coined in 1845 by a magazine editor named John O’Sullivan—spelled out the proud message. “For this blessed mission to the nations of the world, which are shut out from the life-giving light of truth,” thundered O’Sullivan, “has America been chosen.”

  The discovery of gold mere days after Mexico had signed a treaty handing California to the United States only confirmed this bone-deep faith. In California, God had ordained an Eden of sunny days, gentle breezes, mild winters, rich soil, and, lately, treasure. All these gifts He had set aside for his special pets, the Americans. What else could explain the timing of the gold discovery?

  From the beginning, that message of gold-rush-as-moral-fable spilled out from every venue. How was it, the Reverend Samuel Worcester demanded in a January 14, 1849, sermon at the Tabernacle Church in Salem, Massachusetts, that the Spanish, “so ferocious and bloodthirsty in their search and rage for gold,” had never found California’s gold? “It must certainly be that God had a purpose,” and plainly that purpose was to preserve this treasure for the Americans. A decade later, Abraham Lincoln would frame the startling news from California in a similar way. The discovery of gold was not happenstance or good fortune but testimony to Americans’ superior ways, proof that they possessed uncanny alertness and sharpness. “Why,” Lincoln asked, in an 1859 speech on inventions and discoveries, “did Yankees, almost instantly, discover gold in California, which had been trodden upon, and over-looked by Indians and Mexican greasers, for centuries?”

  That faith in America’s special place imbued gold-seekers with a virtuous glow. (Yes, foreigners swarmed to the goldfields too, but their motives were no doubt low and merely mercenary.) Just as it was manifestly the destiny of the United States to expand from the Atlantic across the continent to the Pacific, so it was indisputably the destiny—almost the duty—of the bold and ambitious to better their station in life as quickly and dramatically as possible. To do otherwise was to reject a gift from God.

  This emphasis on material success was new. In colonial America a self-made man had been a figure to admire, but “self-made” was not yet a synonym for “well-off.” Early on, the term had more to do with a man’s character than with his finances. A self-made man had succeeded in improving himself, by the exercise of piety, thrift, and discipline. He was “self-made” in almost a literal sense, as if he had sculpted the raw material of himself into a more attractive shape. If in time his social standing happened to rise as well, that was pleasant but not really the point.

  In the nineteenth century, “self-made” took on new overtones. The self-made man remained the American ideal—the presidential election of 1840, the “Log Cabin Campaign,” turned on the humble background of man-of-the-people William Henry Harrison—but now a “successful” man was a worldly success as well as a spiritual one.* Prosperity was a sign of virtue, because it served as proof of drive, vigor, and determination. To call an American “self-made” was to honor him; the sneer implicit in the French “nouveau riche” was entirely absent. In the land of opportunity, praise went to those who saw their chance and grabbed it.

  And if prosperity was the goal, what better way to prosper than to head west to find gold? In California, Americans would do well for themselves and would, at the same time, bring the values of hard work, enlightened Protestantism, and modern ways to a land encumbered by sloth, benighted Catholicism, and rural backwardness. “The farm boy who embarked on the California adventure was more than a mere seeker after wealth,” writes the gold rush chronicler Ray Billington. “He was a white knight riding forth in the service of humanity.”


  This was the era of “America’s national adolescence,” in the phrase of the historian David Kennedy, and America was no more appealing than most teenagers. Americans walked with a strut and shouted their virtues at every opportunity. (“In the States,” one visiting Scotsman observed, “to blow your own horn, and to make as much noise as possible with it, is the most fundamental principle of all business.”) As with adolescents, some of the bravado perhaps hinted at doubts beneath the surface—the Panic of 1837 was only a few years in the past, after all, and who was to say it could not return like a bad dream?—but few confessed to any such subversive thoughts.

  So throughout the 1840s, the Fourth of July—a more important holiday than it is today and seldom an occasion for modesty or doubt in any era—was greeted with an extra dose of back-slapping gusto. All the more so when celebrated by emigrants on their way to the goldfields. “Let us glory in the magnificence of our great inheritance,” proclaimed a Fourth of July orator in 1849, aboard the California-bound bark Sylph, “as one star after another takes its place in our glorious Union, and one ocean after another enlarges the area of freedom, and one banner after another trails in the dust before our stripes and stars.”

  Overland travelers observed the Fourth with similarly rapturous speeches. Israel Lord celebrated Independence Day in the company of about one hundred other gold-seekers but characteristically gave short shrift to the bluster. He endured “any quantity of speeches, and sentiments, and firing of guns” and noted curtly that “one man had a thumb shot off.”

  For emigrants traversing the continent, the date had an additional significance. If they had reached a landmark called Independence Rock by the Fourth, in what is today southwest Wyoming, they were on pace to reach the far side of the continent before snow blocked the passes through the Sierra Nevada. Any later and they might share the Donners’ fate.

  Alonzo Delano arrived at the huge, smooth, granite hillock ahead of schedule, on June 22, Israel Lord a few weeks later, on July 13. Joseph Bruff, a man hard to rattle and impossible to hurry, would not arrive for another two weeks. On the Fourth of July, he was still in Nebraska, in the vicinity of Chimney Rock. He made a careful sketch of the towering formation, complete with a tiny figure on horseback at its base, for scale.

  Even after weeks on the trail, Bruff found nearly everything of interest. He made careful drawings of “the singular and romantic bluffs” and took cheerful note of the cactus flowers, which came in both red and white, and fields of poppies, in orange. On one occasion when he had wandered off on his own to explore, his men sent a messenger with a note imploring him to “hurry up.”

  Only days after they had scolded him for dawdling, Bruff paused once again. He had spotted a “small animal of the Lemur genus with cheek pouches filled with grass-seed.” Surely this curious creature—Bruff learned that it was called a “gofer”—deserved to be recorded. Bruff made a color-coded drawing.

  Weightier events made for longer delays. On July 8, Bruff’s company lost its first man to cholera. The death was “sudden and astounding,” Bruff wrote glumly, and he organized a formal funeral. A sentimental man despite his military bearing, Bruff composed a long poem in honor of his fallen companion. “The adventurer’s train, / On the Platte river plain / Was halted at an early hour; / For a comrade was ill, / Whom no medical skill / Could save from a Higher power!” the opus began, and it concluded, many verses later, “And a tear did trace / Each sun-burnt face.”

  The dead man was sewn into a blue blanket and carried on a bier of tent poles to a newly dug grave hundreds of yards off the trail. Bruff spent three hours carving a headstone and filling in the engraved letters in black (with grease normally used to keep the wagon wheels lubricated). The company donned their uniforms and marched to the graveside two by two, to the accompaniment of a dirge played by bugle, flute, violin, and accordion. A prayer was read aloud, the Stars and Stripes placed atop the body, and a contingent of men, holding reins as coffin straps, lowered their companion into a rock-lined grave.

  On March 13, 1849, Jennie Megquier wrote her daughter a letter from Chagres, the port town in Panama where her steamship had just docked. “It is the most beautiful spot I ever saw. The shores are covered with a thick growth of trees and in front of us rises one of those old castles that we read of.”

  Her enthusiasm was genuine, not put on to lift her daughter’s spirits. Thrilled with her first peek at life in the tropics, Megquier reveled at the unfamiliar sights. Here were marvels that one saw only in drawings—palm trees, coconuts, huts covered in palm leaves. The next day, when she and her companions began their journey upriver into the jungle, Megquier grew even more excited. “The air was filled with the music of the birds, the chattering of the monkeys, parrots in any quantity, alligators lying on the banks too lazy to move unless you went very near them.” It was, she exclaimed, “the most romantic scene I ever beheld.”

  Few visitors to Panama shared her enthusiasm. Horrified from the moment they stepped ashore, even experienced travelers shuddered as they looked around them. Panama was muddy, dangerous, and disease-ridden, not a tropical garden but a festering swamp. “Probably there was not in all the world a more loathsome spot,” wrote Hubert Bancroft, who passed through Panama on his way to California in 1852. The “most beautiful spot” that Megquier had ever seen was, in the historian’s view, “a bed of slime and decaying vegetation reeking pestilence, alive with crawling reptiles, given over of nature to the vilest of her creations.”

  In prose as overripe as the jungle itself, Bancroft catalogued Panama’s defects. “The very ground on which one trod was pregnant with disease, and death was distilled in every breath of air.” In the swamplike humidity, furniture sprouted mold and fell apart before your eyes, and iron rusted overnight. Panama might boast “the finest vultures on the planet,” Bancroft observed, but it could claim no other superlative.

  The writer Frank Marryat, also bound for California’s goldfields, was another who failed to see the beauty that Megquier detected in Chagres. “It is composed of about fifty huts, each of which raises its head from the midst of its own private malaria, occasioned by the heaps of filth and offal, which putrefying under the rays of a vertical sun, choke up the very doorway.”

  Marryat’s condemnation of Chagres differed from Bancroft’s in only one particular. The town did boast a distinction besides vultures. Just as some villages were famous for hats or baskets, and every visitor left with a souvenir, so all visitors to Chagres carried away a memento of their visit. In the case of Chagres, the local, not-to-be-missed specialty was tropical fever, and many travelers on their way to California “acknowledged the superiority of this malady by giving up the ghost a very few hours after landing.”

  The journey across Panama was a two-stage affair, about sixty miles in all, starting with a forty-mile excursion up the Chagres River to a village called Gorgona. From the moment they landed in Chagres, travelers clamored to get away, not so much because of the squalor as because of their eagerness to get rich before all of California’s gold was gone. With every day’s delay, there would be less treasure left to find and more men hunting for it. When newly rich, homeward-bound travelers paraded through Chagres displaying their wealth, the tension spiked to almost unbearable levels. “A returning Californian had just reached the place,” wrote a journalist covering the gold rush for the New York Tribune, “with a box containing $22,000 in gold-dust, and a four-pound lump in one hand.” The town lost its mind. “Life and death were small matters compared with immediate departure from Chagres,” the Tribune reported. “Men ran up and down the beach shouting and gesticulating.”

  The only way out was by dugout canoe up the river. But the boatmen who poled the canoes knew that new steamers crammed with frantic passengers arrived every day. They took their time and raised their fees. (In the early days boatmen charged $10 a passenger. Within months the rate had climbed as high as $50.)

  On March 20, 1849, Jennie and Thomas Megquier and
a companion set out upriver perched atop their luggage in the middle of a hand-hewn canoe, barely above the rushing water. The canoe was two feet wide and twenty feet long, propelled by one man in the bow and one in the stern. Each boatman wielded a long pole, thrusting it against the shallow river bottom and then pushing off, every muscle tensed, like a pole-vaulter working in slow motion. The boatmen were “naked or [wearing] nothing but a bit of cloth about their loins,” Jennie wrote, “the perspiration pouring off them in torrents.” (The nonchalant tone is noteworthy. Nakedness was a charged topic in the mid-1800s; faced with the boatmen of the Chagres, even so rough a character as the future general Ulysses Grant resorted to joking euphemism. The men, Grant wrote, were “not inconveniently burdened with clothing.”)

  At night, in camp, Megquier scribbled her observations in an unpunctuated ecstasy. “Would to God I could describe the scene. The birds singing monkeys screeching the Americans laughing and joking as they pushed us along through the rapids was enough to drive one mad with delight.”

  The stopovers, in villages of a few huts, were not luxurious. Chairs and tables were not to be seen, nor forks or spoons. Megquier reveled in it all. “To eat soup with a jackknife is no small job,” she observed happily. Pigs, hens, dogs, cats, and ducks all clustered round the diners, hoping for scraps. Megquier, who prided herself on gulping down whatever was put before her, managed nearly everything except “stewed Monkeys and Iguanoes.” She might try them eventually, she wrote a friend back in Maine, but her “appetite has not been quite sharp enough to relish those yet.”

  Come dark, someone found the Megquiers a bed (rather than the standard hammock), but sleep was next to impossible. Villagers streamed in throughout the night, eager to clap eyes on their strange guests. Jennie, a bit of a ham even at four in the morning, reveled in the attention. “They would come and look at me as one of the greatest curiosities in the world,” she boasted to her daughter.