The Rush Page 3

  If you craved adventure, this would be an adventure like no other. If you yearned for security, you could set yourself up for a lifetime. If you were on your own and independent, what better time to pick up and go? If you had a family and responsibilities, how better to meet your obligations than by riding home in a wagon full of gold?

  And what were the obstacles? The trip would be long and difficult, true, but sailors made longer voyages, and a handful of resourceful emigrants had recently proved that the overland route was doable, too. Barely doable, perhaps, but a dash of danger made the notion all the more enticing, in a Boy’s Own Adventure way.

  In any case, what was the alternative? The Panic of 1837 had proved that the world might collapse without warning, but no one had quite decided on the moral of that story. Was the lesson to lie low, in fear of the next economic blast? The cautious and the elderly might say so, and they did, but the nation was young, and the clamor of eager, impatient voices drowned out the bleak lectures and the dark warnings.*

  America in the 1800s was not merely young but young in a double sense. The nation itself had been born almost within living memory, and its citizens were young, too. Take every American in 1850 and arrange them all in a colossal line from youngest to oldest, and the person at the midway point—the typical American—would have been just under nineteen years old. Today, that median American would be nearly twice as old, a shade past thirty-five.

  Many of those young strivers felt certain that when an opportunity came along, you grabbed it with both hands. And this was an opportunity like no other, ever. “What would you do,” asks Gary Kurutz, one of the deans of gold rush history, “if you were a young man today? What would you do if somebody came along and said there was a place you could go and you’d make $10,000 a day, tax-free?

  “Well, you can see why there was a stampede to California. The idea was that in one season you’d harvest enough gold to take care of yourself and your family”—here Kurutz’s voice rises in high-pitched incredulity—“for the rest of your life. You’d be a fool not to go.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “I BELIEVE I HAVE FOUND A GOLD MINE!”

  WHEN AMERICA LOST ITS mind in 1849, and then the rest of the world did, too, the temptation among the historically minded was to think of other examples of mass madness. In the tulip mania of the 1600s in Holland, these skeptics pointed out, men spent more on a single bulb than it would have cost to buy the grandest house in Amsterdam. And that was far from the only economic frenzy the world had seen before the Sierra beckoned.

  Today we think of more recent debacles. In the Internet bubble, around 1999, companies that had never earned a penny raised hundreds of millions in stock offerings and then went bust. In the real estate bubble of the early 2000s, Americans convinced themselves that housing prices would climb forever. Anyone could trade up from an ordinary suburban home to a turret-sprouting mansion, it seemed, or buy that mansion for next to nothing down.

  But those comparisons do not apply, except in the sense that the world did go mad when the gold news broke. Unlike dot-coms built on pipe dreams, California’s gold was real and tangible. Unlike mansions built for imaginary buyers, gold had a ready market. Unlike shares in exotic new companies or suddenly-in-reach new houses, whose value was a matter of guesswork, the value of gold was fixed and settled and public.

  The gold rush was not a bubble. California’s reality outshone even the most overheated fantasies. In 1849 alone, miners dug up seventeen tons of gold. Every pebble in that golden mountain had guaranteed value—$20.67 an ounce in the United States, backed by the federal government—and a similar value around the world. Over the course of the 1850s, miners would unearth a trove of gold worth, in today’s money, $12 billion.

  The problem with gold had never been that it was merely a fad—mankind had craved gold since before the dawn of writing—but that it was so hard to find. And now it wasn’t.

  “Neither moth nor rust devoureth it,” wrote the Greek poet Pindar, twenty-five centuries ago, “but the mind of man is devoured by this supreme possession.” Today gold is used, in tiny amounts, in cameras, phones, and computers, but for most everyday purposes it is too expensive for anything but jewelry.* The result is that gold is never “used up,” in the sense that a piece of firewood or a lump of coal is transformed unrecognizably.

  Virtually all the gold ever mined can still be found today, perhaps changed in shape but always unmistakably itself. Gold from a goblet that Caesar raised to his lips may now dangle from the ears of a young girl dressing for her prom or glint from the front tooth of a rap star. The very gold that launched the worldwide rush to California can be examined today, at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., almost as if one could look at a court artist’s portrait of Helen of Troy. “San Francisco, 1848,” the label reads. “This paper contains the first piece of gold ever discovered in the northern part of Upper California.”

  It is a strange thing, this combination of uselessness and mad desirability. What object other than gold do we covet for such unfathomable reasons? We gaze at The Girl with a Pearl Earring and marvel at how Vermeer conjured up beauty from a badger-hair brush and a few hand-ground pigments; we see a jet engine and recognize its power; we look at Lincoln’s bloody shirt and feel the tug of history. But how to account for the allure of gold? No less a financial wizard than Warren Buffett proclaimed himself baffled. “Gold gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.”

  For the craftsman, gold’s softness and workability are the properties that set it apart. Gold is so malleable that a lump the size of a sugar cube can be beaten into a sheet a hundred feet square. This is gold leaf, beloved of artisans since ancient times. Thin enough to see through, a golden stack five hundred leaves high would be only as tall as a single sheet of aluminum foil. And even at this next-to-nothing thinness, gold will remain forever unchanged by air, water, or nearly any acid.

  But it was gold’s weight, not its softness, that made the gold rush possible. Gold is nearly twice as dense as lead. If a basketball were solid gold, it would weigh more than three hundred pounds, and only a titan could pick it off the floor. In a river, that heaviness makes all the difference.

  Since gold is rare, no one would ever find it if it were scattered randomly, a grain here and a grain there. It is, in fact, absurdly rare, a needle in a field of haystacks. Gather up a billion atoms at random from the earth’s crust, the geologist Keith Meldahl explains, and only five would be gold. (By way of comparison with more common elements, a billion atoms of crust picked at random would include 470,000 atoms of oxygen and 45,000 of iron.) To find enough gold for one wedding ring, you would have to sift through two hundred tons of dirt.

  In California and a handful of other places around the globe, nature has contrived to gather and concentrate those few atoms in the form of flakes and nuggets. The action takes place deep underground, over the course of eons, and the geologic tumult plays out in different ways in different locales. Beneath what would someday be California, plates collided, and the ground cracked, and plumes of superheated, mineral-rich water coursed their way upward through the fractures. What remained were newly lifted mountain ranges striped with quartz veins snaking their way along, mile upon mile. In those stone veins was gold.

  Ever so gradually, weather and water ate into those mountainsides and those veins. Bits of gold-bearing rock washed downhill and tumbled into rivers. Those rocks clicked and tapped against other rocks. Eventually—not always, but often—the brittle quartz casing chipped away, freeing the gold within.

  Now gold’s weight came into play. Gold in a river settles out wherever the current slows, precisely because gold is so heavy. In swirling eddies or quiet spots on the sheltered side of rocks and boulders, the river sheds its burden of golden flakes and grains while still propelling alo
ng its load of much-lighter sand and gravel. Day after day, year after year, the river runs its course, and bits of dense, bright gold sink to the riverbed. Someday, perhaps, a grizzled man will shout “Eureka!”

  Gold had always belonged to kings and emperors. Those who owned it lived splendid, pampered lives; those who mined it labored their lives away for the benefit of others, scarcely better off than slaves. Those were simple, brutal, eternal facts, as much a part of gold’s essence as its color or its weight.

  One historian writing before the time of Christ described gold mining in ancient Egypt. Slaves worked the underground mines, wrote Diodorus of Sicily, dragging their shackles behind them. Guards hovered nearby, and to rule out even the possibility of a conspiracy, guards were matched with prisoners whose language they did not speak. No mercy was shown the sick or injured or old, or women. All were worked without letup “until through ill-treatment they die in the midst of their tortures.”

  Matters had improved only marginally through the ages. Just before the discovery of California’s gold, most of the world’s gold came from Siberia. The harsh landscape, the bitter cold, and the brutal working conditions had almost nothing in common with sun-baked California. Siberia’s miners were not free men hoping to make themselves a fortune but, for the most part, prisoners who had been banished for minor offenses. They worked fourteen hours a day, from five in the morning to eight in the evening every day but Sunday, for tiny wages. Police and Cossacks patrolled the mines; secret police spied on would-be thieves.

  The czar, a world away in Saint Petersburg, owned the mines outright or imposed stiff taxes on their wealthy proprietors. Theirs was a good business even so. One dazzled visitor, in 1845, reported on the luxuries with which a Siberian mine owner could ease his isolation. Servants produced “on a plate of Japanese porcelain, oranges imported from Marseilles or from Messina.” Costly wines and “inexhaustible springs of champagne” flowed at every meal.

  But no one owned California’s gold.

  The first to race to the goldfields were those who happened to be standing nearest the starting gun. But even these fortunate few dawdled before they ran, sure that the big talk would soon prove empty. No one would have guessed, early on, that the discovery of gold at Sutter’s mill would eventually take on the tone of legend. Today the story is as encrusted with myth as the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving or Paul Revere’s ride. By most accounts, it was the morning of January 24, 1848, when a moody, oddball carpenter named James Marshall muttered a phrase destined to become famous. “Boys, by God, I believe I have found a gold mine!”

  Marshall’s “boys” were a work crew, mostly Mormon, building a sawmill on the American River about forty miles from what would one day be Sacramento. Marshall, a skilled and versatile workman despite his peculiar ways, was the foreman on the job. Work had reached a point where the next task was to divert a stream of water from the river so that it would drive the mill’s waterwheel. Marshall’s focus was the water itself, rather than anything within it. But as he described his discovery later, on one January day he happened to notice a tiny, yellowish pebble lying a foot deep in rushing water. He snatched up the nubbin—about the size of a pencil eraser—and stared at it. Could it be? Marshall knew little about gold, but he knew that it was soft rather than brittle. He set the gleaming pebble down carefully on a flat rock, picked up another rock, and delivered a sharp blow. The tiny nugget flattened a bit, like a lump of clay squeezed between thumb and forefinger, but it did not crack. Marshall ran to find his co-workers.

  One of those men left his own account of the discovery. Henry Bigler recalled seeing Marshall run up, a smile plastered on his face and his battered, white hat cradled in his hands. Marshall blurted out that he’d found gold. The men gathered around. Marshall carefully set his hat down. There, in a small dent poked in the crown, sat a few golden pebbles. One of the men reached into his pocket and withdrew a five-dollar gold coin. The others looked back and forth, comparing coin and golden bits. Not exactly alike, they concluded, but close enough.

  That night Bigler scrawled an entry in his diary: “Monday 24th this day some kind of mettle was found in the tail race that looks like goald, first discovered by James Martial the Boss of the Mill.”

  Remarkably, Marshall’s men stuck mostly to their assigned jobs over the next few weeks, despite the discovery. (They feared the find would amount to only a few scattered flakes.) In their spare time the most optimistic scoured the river up and down. Bigler, in particular, confessed that he had “gold badly on the brain.” He took to dodging his workmates and sneaking off to the ice-cold American River. There he crouched for hours, in February, in the rain and snow, naked and shivering in the river and poking bits of gold out of crevices in the rocks with his knife.

  The man best positioned to cash in on the discovery was John Sutter, the biggest landowner in the region. It was Sutter, an eccentric, ambitious, amiable Swiss emigré, who had sent Marshall to build him a mill in the first place. Even before anyone ever whispered a word about gold, Sutter was one of the best-known figures in California. He had fled Europe just ahead of a posse of irate bill collectors fourteen years before, and then had reinvented himself as a New World emperor. Here in America, Sutter was not a small, chubby, bankrupt merchant with a wife and five children. He was Captain John Sutter (he bestowed the title himself), an imposing figure with elegant manners, a formal way of speaking, and a taste for ornate military uniforms complete with epaulettes and sword. “I am no ordinary gentleman, no Sir,” he was fond of saying. “I am an extraordinary gentleman, yes Sir, I am. I strive to be honored. I will do anything for honor.”

  In 1839 Sutter had talked the Mexican government into granting him title to a huge expanse of land—seventy-five square miles—in the lush Sacramento Valley. Sutter dubbed his kingdom New Helvetia. At its heart, in what is now Sacramento, he built an enormous structure he called Sutter’s Fort, with thick adobe walls guarded by cannons. A sentry stood watch at the main gate, and Sutter maintained a private army of some two hundred men, for protection and pomp.

  In the California wilderness, the soldiers in their green-and-blue uniforms trimmed with red provided just the kind of incongruous splendor that Sutter relished. The soldiers were Indians, their officers Europeans. In the evenings they practiced marching drills. Officers barked out the German commands for “forward, march” and “right, face” and “about, face.” Fife and drum played, and Sutter beamed.

  Within the sprawling compound could be found a blacksmith’s shop, a shoemaker’s, a carpenter’s, a factory that turned out hats and blankets, a dining hall (though Sutter fed his Indian “employees” outdoors, from a trough). Outside the walls were orchards, wheat fields, a vineyard, a tannery, a flour mill, and, notably, a sawmill. Sutter reigned proudly over it all like a medieval baron. “I had at the same time twelve thousand head of cattle and two thousand horses and ten or fifteen thousand sheep,” he would later recall. “I had all the Indians I could employ.”

  The Indians, hundreds of them, worked indoors as servants and outdoors as field hands, for “wages” of trinkets and trade goods. Their working conditions were as poor as their wages. One startled observer described the wheat harvest, with “three or four hundred wild Indians in a grain field armed, some with sickles, some with butcher knives, some with pieces of hoop iron roughly fashioned into shapes like sickles, but many having only their hands with which to gather up by small handfuls the dry and brittle grain; and as their hands would soon become sore, they resorted to willow sticks, which were split to afford a sharper edge with which to sever the straw.”

  Harvesting wheat by hand was an astonishing throwback, and the threshing process—to break up the grain and chaff into small bits—was more primitive still. “The harvest of weeks, sometimes of a month, was piled up in… a huge mound in the middle of a high, strong, round, corral,” the same amazed eyewitness wrote. “Then three or four hundred wild horses were turned in to thresh it, the Indians whooping t
o make them run faster.” Finally, on a windy day, the valuable grain and the worthless chaff would be flung high into the air. The light chaff would blow off, the heavier grain would fall into a heap, and a harvest that smacked more of Breughel than of the nineteenth century would be complete.

  The town nearest Sutter’s Fort was San Francisco, ninety miles away and with a population of about eight hundred. Rumors of a nearby gold strike reached San Francisco in February or March, 1848. The town yawned. People had found gold in California before, and those finds had fizzled. A few people had grown excited; nobody had grown rich.

  On March 15, 1848, the newspapers chimed in for the first time, but without much zeal. The Californian reported that gold had been found “in considerable quantities” at the sawmill on the American River. The story ran as part of a news roundup, along with such items as “Grizzly Bear” and “Man Drowned,” though not quite as prominently placed. Like the others, “Gold Mine Found” rated only a single paragraph and ran buried inside the paper.

  A bigger story might have fallen flat, too, for the Californian was not a formidable institution. A four-page weekly, the Monterey-based paper had begun printing just two years before. (This made it California’s first newspaper.) The editor, a wry, Yale-educated New Englander named Walter Colton, had explained in a brochure promoting his new venture that for a time his newspaper would have an odd look; he had bought a secondhand printing press and could not print the letter w. (The previous owners were Spanish, and traditional Spanish has no w’s.) “In the meantime vve must use two V’s… in due time vvee vvill have something better. VValter Colton.”