The Rush Read online

  Especially riches pulled from the ground. Two-thirds of all American workers labored on farms, with sweat and muscle the only fuels. “There was no quittin’ time and no startin’ time,” a folk proverb declared. “It was all the time.” The ancient decree still held: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.” Such was man’s lot. Many could not imagine an alternative.

  But it had always been hard to banish hope altogether. Though everyone recognized that life was a grim affair best taken one wary step at a time, that was hard to accept. Consolation came in small distractions, akin to purchases of lottery tickets today. In colonial times so many people had spent their time searching for pirates’ buried treasure that Benjamin Franklin wrote an essay rebuking them. The way to wealth, he insisted, was to pile coin on coin, steadily and patiently. The earth offered a living, but it was a hard, grudging living. Franklin told a story of a wise father who had given his son a parcel of land: “ ‘I assure thee I have found a considerable quantity of gold by digging there; thee mayst do the same. But thee must carefully observe this, Never to dig more than plow deep.’ ”

  Now the president had announced that Ben Franklin had it all wrong.

  Americans had been moving west, in short hops and long jumps, for generations. “If hell lay to the west,” the saying went, “Americans would cross heaven to get there.” Most of those early settlers had been small farmers seeking better land or bigger holdings than a man could find in the more crowded East. Their new farms looked just like the old ones. So did the new towns that sprung up around them.

  That familiarity was the point. These transplanted families hoped to find, in one historian’s summary, “not a totally new life but a better old one.” The gold-seekers stood that familiar ambition on its head. They’d had enough of the old ways. More than anything else, they wanted a totally new life.

  Nor was this the only way in which the gold-seekers differed from nearly all the Americans who had ventured west before them. They intended to go thousands of miles farther, for starters. And those earlier travelers had been family men with wives and children in tow, most of them, or else mountain men and trappers, solitary adventurers unfazed by Rocky Mountain snowstorms and desert treks.

  The gold-seekers belonged to neither camp. Many had never ventured away from streetcars and gaslights. Most were young, single, inexperienced men, the vast majority still in their twenties or thirties. Their “toil had heretofore consisted,” one of them wrote, “in running up a column of figures or counting bankbills.”

  In an era of dollar-a-day incomes, those who went west before 1848 had hoped simply to prosper as farmers. A few had made it all the way to California before anyone had ever heard of gold. Then the throngs arrived, and the farmers stared at the newcomers in disbelief, as dumbfounded by the commotion as time travelers. “My little girls can make from 5 to 25 dollars washing gold in pans,” wrote one of these astonished emigrants, a Missouri man named M. T. McClellan. “My average income this winter will be about $150 per day, and if I should strike a good lead it will be a great deal more.”

  Letters like that one, to a hometown friend, carried enormous weight. This was eyewitness testimony, and utterly specific. “You know James M. Harlin,” McClellan went on. “He has just bought a Mexican ranch, for which he has paid in gold $12,000.” Nor was that all. “Jesse Beasley is said to be worth at least $40,000.… You know Bryant, a carpenter, who used to work for Ebenezer Dixon; he has dug out more gold in the last six months than a mule can pack.” Harlin’s ranch cost a sum that would have taken a ditchdigger back home almost thirty-three years to accrue, even if he’d had no other expenses during those decades. And he had made the money like that.

  The new arrivals not only passed along these astounding stories but vouched for them with the most solemn oaths they could summon. “The above account and description of matters and things will seem strange to you,” McClellan concluded, “but, sir, if you believe Divine Revelations or the sacred truths of Holy Writ, you can believe this statement.”

  Those first settlers had hoped to stay in one spot and cultivate the land for generations. The gold-seekers wanted to snatch a fortune from the ground and then hurry back home. That was a crucial difference. But it was the sheer size of the gold rush, above all, that set it apart from anything the world had seen since the Crusades. The rush was colossal. In 1849, some ninety thousand young men swarmed to the goldfields (two-thirds of them were American); in 1850, nearly as many more elbowed their way into the scrum, and the throngs kept coming all through the early 1850s. Even if for the moment we focus only on the Americans and not on the crowds from around the world, this was an immense volunteer army, all of them racing toward a goal none of them had ever seen.

  In the four years from 1849 through 1852, more than 1 percent of the American population moved to California. To put that number in terms of today’s population, picture three million young Americans giving up their jobs, leaving their families, and rushing off to a barely known destination thousands of miles away. Picture them on foot—though few of them had ever slept under the stars—or on shipboard—though few had ever ventured out of sight of land—and all racing headlong to, say, the most distant, least-known corner of South America.

  All this was out of the blue. Despite the advent of the train and the steamship, most Americans in the 1840s lived their entire lives inside a tiny circle centered on their hometown. Sailors and whalers aside, a man who had ventured a hundred miles from home was a traveler with tales to tell. For nearly everyone, California was more a name than an actual place, an exotic, half-unreal locale like China or Egypt. It was a name, moreover, that conjured up not simply the West but the farthest edge of the West. That made for extra allure and for a shiver of excitement, too.

  In American history, “the West” has always been a moving target. The West began where towns ended and danger began. One worried father in colonial days sent his daughter off to visit relatives who lived fifteen miles away, near Boston. “I did greatly fear for Abigail’s safety, as she is gone into Duxbury,” he wrote in his diary. “It is her first journey into the West, and I shall pray mightily for her early return.”

  By the early 1800s the boundary had moved to today’s Midwest. (When the New York editor Horace Greeley famously advised young men to “go West,” in 1838, he had in mind not empty deserts and soaring mountains but the lush farmland of Ohio and Illinois.) By 1849 the line had shifted to the western borders of Missouri and Iowa. Cross the Missouri River at Saint Joseph, Missouri, or Council Bluffs, Iowa, and you had entered the West.

  California sat at the distant edge of that mysterious and still poorly mapped expanse. (The name “California” came from a Spanish novel, published in 1510, about a faraway land “abounding with gold and precious stones.”) Since the mid-1700s it had belonged to Spain and then, since 1821, to Mexico. Neither country had managed to lure many of its citizens to settle the new territory; Mexico, in desperation, had briefly tried sending off convicts as unwilling immigrants. In 1848, California’s non-Indian population totaled only fifteen thousand, about one person for every ten square miles. The Indian population was ten times as large.

  It was not until 1841 that the first group of emigrants traveled overland to what would someday be known as the Golden State, and not until 1845 that the first wagons managed to cross the Sierra Nevada. In 1848 the number who made the overland trip was only four hundred. Those few travelers inching across a vast continent were, in one historian’s words, “as lonely as men left swimming in mid-ocean from a sunken ship.”

  Then came news of California’s gold. One awed ’49er looked at the hordes of dreamers all around him. “There seemed to be an unending stream of emigrant trains,” William Johnston wrote, in present-day eastern Kansas. “It was a sight which, once seen, can never be forgotten; it seemed as if the whole family of man had set its face westward.”

  The soon-to-be-rich ran from merchant to merchan
t outfitting themselves with necessities for the journey. They weighed themselves down with cumbersome contraptions like the “Archimedes Gold Washing Machine” and the “California Gold Finder.” A group of gold-seekers from France bought up a supply of rakes, for the men, and silver tongs, for their wives. The men planned to rake gold nuggets out of the rivers, leaving the flakes and dust behind for those content with such small prizes. The wives, in the meantime, would perch atop stools embroidered in silk and pluck bits of gold from gravel-filled china dishes.

  A Rochester, New York, man hired a clairvoyant to accompany him to California, so he could use his partner’s psychic powers to learn where the gold lay hidden. In Indiana, buyers lined up for a special salve called “California Gold Grease” that guaranteed a lifetime of wealth. All a man had to do was climb to the top of a hill in gold country, rub his body with the magical ointment, and roll downhill. By the time he reached the bottom and scraped himself clean, he would have a fortune to last the rest of his days. Ten dollars a box.

  A young gold-seeker from Ohio put the universal thought into plain words: “The rich for many years have had chances for filling their pockets. Let the poor now have a chance.” Nor was it only the young and adventurous who succumbed. Many who were too old or too staid to set out on a long, dangerous journey did the next-best thing—they backed a young miner, or a dozen, in return for a share of the enormous profits certain to come their way.

  A week before the gold news hit, a young man seeking a ten-dollar loan would have been slapped down for his extravagance. Now, when he needed $750 or $1,000 for the overland trip or a sea voyage, no one blinked. “The United States was not a rich country in the latter 1840s,” the historian Oscar Lewis observed, but “it was absurd to count costs when a sure fortune awaited whoever could contrive to reach the gold fields in the van of the stampede.”

  The prospect of repaying those loans spurred not anxiety but fantasies of a glorious homecoming. The case of a young Pittsburgh man named George Barclay was more or less typical. Barclay set out with provisions and funds provided by his banker uncle, who also provided several wooden kegs bound with iron hoops. The plan was that he would repay his uncle by returning the kegs filled with gold dust.

  If the gold-seekers hesitated, the hardship that preyed on their minds was not failure—for who could imagine returning empty-handed from a land of plenty?—but loneliness and exile. To travel to California and then to dig up a fortune and travel home again would take two or three years at least, and quite possibly five or six. “What makes you think I won’t return, / With lots of gold to adorn you?” one song asked, “Dry up your tears and do not mourn, / There’s wealth in California.”

  While sweethearts wept, parents and clergymen scolded. To leave behind the “wholesome restraints of New England Society” and head to the goldfields, Elisha Cleaveland warned the young men in his New Haven, Connecticut, congregation, would be to join “the filth and scum of society” who had “poured in there to seethe and ferment into one putrid mass of unmitigated depravity.” Perhaps the Yale students who made up most of Cleaveland’s audience cowered at the thought of participating in such wild goings-on.

  But then, on this January morning in 1849, Cleaveland went on to put the case against gold fever in such a way as to make sure that no one heeded a single cautionary word of his sermon. Temptation was natural, Cleaveland conceded, when “within our borders [was] a tract of country larger than New England, underlaid, we know not how deep, with pure gold.” The gold could be “sifted in immense quantities, from the sands of the rivers, or picked from the rocks, or gathered from the surface of the ground… free to all as the air we breathe.”

  Parents railed against their children for their foolishness—and this in an era when the young traditionally deferred to their elders. Why did they believe there were shortcuts to wealth? Had anyone ever seen such a thing? And what of family responsibility? Who would make up the income these wayward sons had brought in, or do the work they proposed to neglect? What if the dream-dazed wanderers never returned—what would become of their parents when they grew old, with no one to care for them? And even if the gold-seekers did come home, there might be no reunion. California was on the other side of the world. Few people lived into their seventies or eighties; to return after a long absence, it was universally understood, would likely mean coming home too late.

  In December, 1848, a young man living in New York City wrote a letter to his sister in Maine, trying out the argument he planned to make to his father. “You know that I am in the prime of life—a good constitution, know how to shovel, can live in a log house or a tent, and build one, too. You know that I always had a desire to travel, to see something of the world. Now, when shall I ever have a better chance?

  “I can hardly make a living here,” he went on. “We have no capital to carry on business with and it will be a long time before we can get a start. Labor is capital out there.” A man who could work could grow rich! “I have looked at my chance here and I have made up my mind to go, and I am going if I have to go out as a common sailor.” One month later, twenty-three-year-old Franklin Buck was on a ship for California.

  The to-go-or-not-to-go conflict pitted not only wary fathers against eager sons but two deeply held beliefs against each other. One was the age-old fear that the world punishes its dreamers, the other the new American gospel that people shaped their own destiny. Was it better to hunker down so as not to tempt fate or to rise up and grab fate by its scrawny neck?

  The waverings of a young Vermont couple, Alfred and Chastina Rix, highlight the difficulties of the decision. Both Rixes were schoolteachers in their early twenties. Alfred was square jawed and earnest in appearance, the kind of wholesome young man who, in the popular fiction of the day, was perpetually reviving fainting ladies. Chastina was small and plain, frail looking but feisty and independent minded, more than willing to join the men’s debate over such news as the Fugitive Slave Act (both Dixes were vehement abolitionists). They had married in July, 1849, when talk of gold was universal. But life in Vermont was far more taken up with toil than talk. When the number of pupils in their school fell perilously low, Alfred took a second job as a traveling salesman. A baby came along. “We are rather poor now days,” Chastina wrote in the diary that she and Alfred kept together. The Rixes stayed in Vermont throughout 1849 but watched one neighbor after another head to California. They lent money to one friend, who headed off “all in a puff for California.”

  Reluctantly, they stayed put. “Cook, cook, cook, & eat is my business,” Chastina wrote bitterly in 1850. “I am just about tired out.” In the same diary entry, perhaps significantly, she found time for a brief mention of the friend in California to whom they had loaned money. “Heard from Hale. He is well.” Did the curtness of that remark tell a story? Alfred sounded just as irritable and exasperated, worn out by the “stale” wisdom he heard incessantly from the respectable, dull old men of Peacham. They wanted nothing more, he complained, than for “the youth who has just come to the age of feeling & excitability” to bury his dreams and settle down “with a lot of old hard-hearted hypocrites.”

  Could he bear that cramped fate? Over the course of the next year Alfred worked up his nerve. “A man with gumption goes by it [i.e., goes for it],” he wrote, “one without any goes where his father did.” Finally, in 1851, Alfred and two of his brothers, along with a brother of Chastina’s, set out to go where their fathers had never been. Chastina stayed behind with the baby, resolved to come out to California as soon as the infant was old enough to travel.

  For the rest of their lives, men and women would remember where they had been when they first heard that the world had turned upside down. “One June morning [in 1848] when I was a boy,” a gold-seeker named Prentice Mulford recalled decades later, “Captain Eben Latham came to our house, and the first gossip he unloaded was that ‘them stories about finding gold in Californy was all true.’ That was the first report I heard from California.
”

  Mulford lived in Sag Harbor, New York, in those days a whaling village. In the young boy’s eyes, the old ship’s captain was an almost mythological figure, and his newest story seemed every bit as thrilling as his other swashbuckling yarns. “Old Eben had been a man of the sea; was once captured by a pirate, and when he told the story, which he did once a week, he concluded by rolling up his trousers and showing the bullet-scars he had received.”

  Now young Prentice Mulford and old Eben Latham, and everyone else, found themselves swept up in a saga of their own. “All the old retired whaling captains wanted to go, and most of them did go,” Mulford wrote. “All the spruce young men of the place wanted to go. Companies were formed, and there was much serious drawing up of constitutions and by-laws for their regulation.”

  To venture to the end of the earth was to take a monumental gamble. But as more and more people made up their minds to set off for the goldfields, a decision to stay at home came to seem less a display of prudence than a stubborn, almost perverse refusal to hold out your hands when the sky was raining money.

  The gold rush offered something for everyone. If you were stuck, you could get free. If you were already moving fast, you could move even faster. If you were a hard worker, what could be better than to work where the reward was buried treasure? If you had an entrepreneurial eye, where better to cash in than in a land of strivers, many of whom would have pockets stuffed with money?