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  Yet another passenger spent his time polishing a scheme to fish for gold without the nuisance of getting his feet wet in a river. He devised a sheet-iron scoop that he planned to attach to a long pole. Safe on shore, he would perch in the shade of a tree and gather up bite after bite of rich, golden sand.

  Other men had brought elaborate, gold-extracting machines equipped with a crank, or two cranks, or a treadle. One especially large mechanism, admired and envied by all, required three attendants—one to turn an enormous handle, another to pour gold-bearing dirt and water in the top, and one more to take the sieved gold from the bottom, stow it in pork barrels, and then fasten the barrels shut. The proprietor of this giant mill, a Mr. Allen from Cambridge, Massachusetts, had brought his servant with him to turn the crank.

  On arrival in San Francisco, the men of the America found the shoreline littered with hundreds of similar contraptions. Even Mr. Allen recognized the message. He abandoned his prize machine in the crowded junkyard.

  With machines or without, the point was to get to the diggings and join the carnival. After their long journey, the new arrivals could scarcely wait. On his first day ashore in California, an Ohio man named Samuel McNeil fielded a question from a stranger—would he help with some carpentry, hammering up the support beams for a canvas-sided building? The job paid eight dollars a day, with meals thrown in free.

  “I had never earned over one dollar a day before,” McNeil recalled, “in twenty years as a shoemaker.” But he waved the offer aside without hesitating a moment. For twenty dollars he found a place on a schooner and headed for Sacramento, on the way to the goldfields.

  McNeil and countless others raced off to dig without even pausing to buy provisions. Once at the goldfields they would find someplace to sleep, something to eat. “As for the prospects of mining,” Alonzo Delano wrote his wife, just before heading out to make his fortune, “all agree that it ranges from eight to a thousand dollars per day. If you get a good place, a few hours will yield hundreds, perhaps thousands, but after getting the hang of the barn you are sure of eight dollars. This is the lowest that I have heard.”

  At a time like this, who could take the time to run from store to store? As soon as they reached the diggings, the emigrants knew, they would reshape their lives. Almost as exciting, they would reshape themselves. A young gold-seeker from Cincinnati, twenty-two-year-old William Perkins, nearly burst with excitement when he sighted his first miners. “Here were real, live miners, men who had actually dug out the shining metal and who had it in huge buckskin pouches in the pockets of their pantaloons. Men who spoke jestingly, lightly of chunks of gold weighing one, five or ten pounds!

  “These men were the awful objects of our curiosity,” Perkins went on, “the demi-gods of the dominion.… Their long rough boots, red shirts, Mexican hats; their huge, uncombed beards covering half the face; the Colt’s revolver attached to its belt behind; the cuchillo [knife] stuck into the leg of the boot—all these things were attributes belonging to another race of men than ourselves, and we looked upon them with a certain degree of respect and with a determination soon to be ourselves as little human-like in appearance as they were.” Clerks no more.

  A first peek at the work itself (as opposed to a glimpse of off-duty miners) proved less enticing. One novice on his way to the diggings witnessed the reality almost as soon as he left town. “Four or five men were working in a ravine by the roadside,” wrote John Borthwick, a Scottish gold-seeker, “digging holes like so many gravediggers.” Undiscouraged by his own analogy, Borthwick worried only that he might be hurrying by huge masses of gold just inches beneath the ground.

  The diggings themselves did not prove entirely reassuring. Before he arrived at the Feather River, Alonzo Delano had harbored vague thoughts of hardy men, vigorous work, and grand views. “You hear of men picking out lumps of gold from the crevices of the rocks as if all they had to do was to stoop down and dig it out,” he wrote. He knew the work would be harder than that, but he had not anticipated just how harsh conditions would be. “On my arrival at the mines there was a heavy rain of twelve hours,” he continued, “and I know of four men who lay out in it, all of whom were too sick with chills and flux to sit up. I let my own blanket and buffalo skin go to cover one man from the storm within two hours after my arrival. His bones now lay on the mountain’s side where the cold storm will trouble him no more.”

  This was indisputable reality. But so was this, in a letter written at almost the same time and place, by two brothers newly arrived in the mines: “Now I will tell you what we have done since we got here; we have worked eight days and have made $16,000.” In one week, in other words, the Springer brothers had made five years’ pay. “There are a great many in the gold diggings at work,” they continued, “some are making fortunes and some are spending fortunes. A man that will half work can make a great fortune in three years.”

  In truth, a miner could count on nothing except that he would work not at half his capacity but to the extreme limit of his strength and stamina. The diggings were aptly named. “The labor of gold-digging is unequalled by any other in the world in severity,” wrote one dismayed soldier-turned-miner. “It combines, within itself, the various arts of canal-digging, ditching, laying stone-walls, ploughing, and hoeing potatoes.”

  To pass from the city to the diggings was to fall through a trapdoor. Life in the city was rowdy and easy, for those who had money; life in the diggings was brutal and harsh, for almost everyone. Miners hefted a shovel or swung a pick while sweating in the sun or freezing in a stream, hour upon hour. Often they were sick; nearly always they were malnourished. And these were men, one of them acknowledged, whose “hardest work at home” had been pushing a pen or dancing a polka.

  Each miner worked in a strange kind of isolation, only a few feet from his companions but cut off from them by the sound of tumbling water and clanging tools, and by exhaustion. Within these noisy cocoons, each man labored on, searching for a rhythm that would ease his task. It was hard to find. One minute a pick would bite into soft gravel, which made a moment’s break. But the next swing might smack a hidden rock and send a shock like an electric charge up the arms and into the shoulders. Swing again and you might crash against a thick layer of stone as hard and unforgiving as pavement.

  Spurred by gold, men worked with a zeal that no boss or overseer could ever have commanded. Life was reduced to grunts, curses, clatter, mud and water, rock and sweat. “It was altogether a scene which conveyed the idea of hard work in the fullest sense of the words,” wrote John Borthwick, the Scottish miner, “and in comparison with which a gang of railway navvies would have seemed to be merely a party of gentleman amateurs playing at working pour passer le temps.”

  Often men turned down jobs with a guaranteed wage double what they were likely to earn in the mines. What was the choice, really? The moment a man took a job with a salary, no matter how high, the possibility of an unbounded future vanished and an impenetrable ceiling crashed into place. Security was not the stuff of dreams; opulence and independence were. Treasure, not wages!

  The gold-seeker Prentice Mulford described a day in the life. First, you dragged yourself awake. Young as they were, the miners rose slow and creaky, like aged warriors. “Working all the day previous, possibly in the water, or with it splashing all about, tugging at heavy boulders, shouldering wet sluices, to say nothing of the regular pick-and-shovel exercise,” wore down the strongest men. Miners who had the luxury of cabins, rather than tents or lean-tos, usually slept on the floor. A few of the more fastidious preferred a table or a bench to the ground, but no one had a mattress, so it made little difference. Men slept in their boots or shoved them beneath their head, as a pillow.

  If a cabin did happen to boast chairs or a table (rather than tree stumps or flour barrels), one observer noted, the floor was sure to be so uneven that the furniture stood on three legs rather than four, “reminding you constantly of a dog with a sore foot.” Boardinghouses were seldom m
uch better. Each morning the first task that faced one hard-pressed proprietor, in Negro Bar, was “scaring the Hogs out of my kitchen and Driving the mules out of my Dining room.”

  Getting dressed took no time. Mulford described the routine: “A pair of damp overalls, a pair of socks, a pair of shoes, or possibly the heavy rubber mining boots. Flannel shirts we slept in.” Then a splash of cold water from a tin basin and a swipe with a comb, which took care of the sprucing up. “Who was there to dress for? Woman? The nearest was half a mile, fifty years of age, and married.”

  You gulped down some flapjacks or fried potatoes while half registering the dreary view through the open door. “There lies the bank of red earth as you left it yesterday,” Mulford recalled. “There is the reservoir full of coffee-colored ditch water which had run in during the night after being used for washing in a dozen claims ‘up country.’ Then you draw on those damp, clammy rubber boots, either to the knee or hip high, the outside splashed with the dried reddish mud, and smelling disagreeably of rubber as you pulled them on and smelling worse as you became heated and perspiring. In these you waddle to the claim.”

  The makeshift towns carried ugly, aggressive names—Red Dog, Gouge Eye, Hangtown, Lady’s Crevice, Jackass Gulch—as if in warning. There was truth in this advertising. Camps were filthy, with bottles and bones and old clothes flung into mud streets dotted with knee-deep bogs. Empty cans of preserved meat, sardines, and oysters heaped up at every doorway.

  Everything was improvised, and most of it was shoddy. In a camp called Indian Bar, a woman died and was laid out on a board that rested atop two butter tubs. Her coffin was made of unstained pine planks. No screws could be found, so the lid was nailed shut while onlookers cringed at the sound of the hammer. Before the march to the graveyard, someone thought to borrow a piece of green cloth from a gambling table, and draped it across the coffin.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  HARD TIMES

  IN THE EARLY DAYS in the mines, technology was nearly beside the point and muscle power almost the only tool. But with treasure as the prize, even the most punishing work was worth a try. One of California’s great virtues was that it abounded in placer gold—the word is pronounced with a short a, like plaster—which was to say, gold sitting on the surface or hidden by only a shallow layer of rock, clay, and gravel, as opposed to gold encased in stone and nearly inaccessible. In ages past, placer gold had been trapped inside rock, like gold elsewhere in the world. The miracle of California was that in countless places time and water had broken the gold free, and rivers and seasonal floods had washed it into streambeds where a man could pick his way to opulence.

  So the miner’s challenge was not to chop gold out of solid rock but to separate the lucrative bits and chunks from vast heaps of debris composed of dirt, gravel, sand, clay, and chunks of rock. It was as if, eons before, careless gods had crisscrossed an immense, stony beach while carrying sacks filled with gold dust fine as flour, and golden flakes like butterfly wings, and pea-sized golden pebbles, and coal-shaped golden lumps. All that gold had spilled, and through the ages nature had hidden it away. It might lie on the ground, but often it lay buried six feet deep or more, under what the miners called “top dirt.” Below the worthless “top dirt” and above the impenetrable bedrock was “pay dirt,” so named because this layer of rock and gravel might contain enough gold to repay the labor of sifting it.*

  Time had gathered these riches into discrete heaps, a treasure trove over here, perhaps, and then a vast, barren expanse and then, possibly, more treasure over there, and on and on. The miner’s task was to keep digging until his labor paid off. This was simple in concept, backbreaking in practice. All you had to do was gather a mound of muck and pour water on it. The water would carry away the light bits and leave behind the gold. The earliest tool, quickly superseded, was a pan with a solid bottom and sloping sides.* The recipe was utterly basic—shovel gravel into the pan; add water; swirl carefully, letting the water carry away the light-weight grit; throw away any big rocks; swirl again; scan the last remaining bits of grit for a glint of gold.

  The first advance in technique was, in essence, to poke holes in the bottom of the pan and to catch the heavy grit that fell through. This was the idea behind the cradle, or rocker, which did in fact resemble a baby’s cradle. A cradle was a wooden trough about four feet long, sitting on rockers and open at one end. Mounted in the cradle, like a drawer in a bureau, was a removable box with a perforated screen as its bottom side. A miner shoveled gravel into the box and then poured water on top of the heap with a dipper, to make a thin, gritty porridge. Sandy, gravelly water—perhaps containing bits of gold—spilled through the holes in the screen. Rocks and bigger chunks of gravel were held back. Then the miner rocked the cradle, which sent the slurry sloshing back and forth and tumbling out the cradle’s open end. The gold remained in the bottom of the cradle, where wooden cleats trapped it in place.

  A further refinement, called a long tom, soon made the cradle obsolete. (In some mining camps, abandoned cradles by the hundreds dotted the riverbanks.) Little more than a trough fifteen or twenty feet long and mounted so that it sat at a tilt, a long tom was effectively a stretched-out cradle. Scale made all the difference. A hose (rather than a dipper) directed a steady stream of water into the tom’s upper end. A team of miners shoveled dirt into the tom as fast as they could manage. A man standing farther along the tom stirred the stony gruel and threw out bits of rock. As in a cradle, an iron screen pocked with holes held back the large bits of debris. Water and grit fell to the tom’s bottom. The crucial task was to gather that grit and wash it again, carefully. Even in a good location, a ton of dirt might yield only an ounce of gold.

  From the start, all miners knew that to find gold you needed water. You searched in rivers, because that was where gold landed as streams and floods sent it on its rolling, tumbling way downhill. And you searched with rivers, because you relied on water to separate ounces of gold from the tons of mud and dirt that usually hid it. In the earliest days, when technology was at its simplest, miners used the river directly, crouching along the bank or standing knee-deep in the current, dipping their gravel-laden pans into the water and washing, sifting, and repeating, hour upon hour. The whole apparatus of rockers and toms and the linked-together troughs called sluice boxes represented nothing but a series of better responses to the same challenge—how could you harness more and more water so that you could wash more and more gold-bearing gravel?

  Within a very few years, miners would find solutions that made outsiders gasp, sometimes in admiration and, more rarely, in horror. In free and independent California, the bold and the ruthless thrived. Gold was the only consideration; nature was a bank whose riches were meant for use, not a museum with exhibits in glass cases. If you wanted to divert a river out of its course (the better to scour the now-exposed channel for gold), go to it! If you chose to chop down all the trees in a valley to get wood for a flume to carry the diverted river, start to work! If the dam you built flooded out your neighbors’ claims, let them build their own dam!

  It was progress, nearly everyone agreed, but no one claimed it was pretty. “A mighty river taken up in a wooden trough,” wrote Louise Clappe, a sharp-eyed Massachusetts woman living in Indian Bar, “strikes me as almost a blasphemy against nature.” And this was far from the only blasphemy. In every camp, holes gouged deep into the ground pocked the landscape and posed a mortal danger to the drunk and the careless. Amputated trees stood as silent sentries on scarred hillsides. Mercury by the ton oozed into pristine rivers.* Canvas hoses slithered along the ground, carrying water to countless long toms; they looked, one miner wrote, “like immensely long slimy sea-serpents.”

  With thousands of miners laboring along every river in gold country, the days when you might stumble upon a nugget of gold ended quickly. Miners scraping futilely in the dirt along the Yuba and the American and the Feather and a score of other rivers soon had no choice but to move farther upstream or higher in
to the foothills. Early on, they had dug only a few feet down to paydirt. Then they dug holes as deep as wells. Now they dug shafts hundreds of feet down into the blackness—“coyote holes,” they called them—or they dug horizontally a thousand feet, if that seemed the most direct route to a buried mine.

  Coyote digging was work for a lone man who spent his days in near darkness, filling and refilling a bucket that his colleagues in the daylight would hoist up and empty. Horizontal shafts were team efforts. Bent over in the gloom (because they had too little room to stand upright), hoping that their candles would not flicker out for lack of air, the miners burrowed their way along with pick and shovel, or crammed wads of gunpowder into chiseled crevices in the wall, lit slow fuses, and retreated to what they hoped was a safe distance.

  At the surface, battalions of men dug long, snaking ditches and canals or built wooden aqueducts to carry water to wash the hard-won buckets of dirt. Clumsily built at first but soon better engineered, these ditches and flumes stretched for miles, meandering across the hills like stitches on the torso of a stabbing victim.

  Some gold-seekers found, after a brief try, that they simply could not meet the physical demands. “Prying up and breaking huge rocks and shoveling dirt from deep pits” was not what he had imagined back at home, one soft-muscled newcomer lamented, as he conjured up the innocent days when he had decided to make “the exchange of the pen for the crowbar.” Another miner, Lucius Fairchild—the young man who’d spent time in his father’s store “selling rags to the ladies of Madison”—came to a similar melancholy insight. “We work from five in the morning until Eleven and then lay by until three when we work until Seven,” he wrote home, “making ten hours a day which is work enough for a counter Hopper like me.”