The Rush Read online

  The Californian’s only rival, the California Star, paid even less attention to the gold rumors. The Star’s editor was a young man named Edward Kemble, just nineteen years old but cynical beyond his years. In April, 1848, Kemble reluctantly ventured out from San Francisco to “ruralize among the rustics” and find out for himself if anything was up at Sutter’s mill.

  Kemble asked James Marshall where the gold was. Marshall gestured toward the river: “You’ll find it anywhere you’re a mind to dig for it down there.” This reply, Kemble ruefully noted later, was not the brush-off he took it to be but almost the literal truth. Kemble and two companions set out, skeptically, to try their hands at this panning business. They spent the afternoon splashing knee-deep in icy water, sifting sand and gravel. Their labors yielded only a flake or two of gold, and Kemble concluded grumpily that all the talk was only talk. “HUMBUG,” he scribbled at the top of his notes.

  Back in San Francisco, Kemble hit the same note in the Star. “All sham,” he wrote. The reports of gold were “a superb take-in as ever was got up to ‘guzzle the gullible.’ ” Nobody but the “superlatively silly” would fall for it. The real story of the week, a glance at the Star would have suggested, was a wondrous medicine called Dr. Benjamin Brandreth’s Vegetable Universal Pills. These marvelous tablets had the power to banish some three dozen afflictions, from colds and cancers to whooping cough, deafness, nightmares, dysentery, worms, and “a sense of fullness in the back part of the head.”

  But Kemble had missed an enormous scoop. While he was advising his readers to forget about gold, men in Marshall’s crew were exploring new sites and raking in fortunes. Each day brought news of another find. Henry Bigler had found $35 worth of gold on April 21; Alexander Stephens had found $45 worth the next day; Azariah Smith (the man who had pulled the five-dollar gold piece from his pocket) had found a better spot and had panned $95 in a day.

  Sutter’s mini-state never recovered. What had been a rural enclave largely preoccupied with wheat and cattle suddenly took on the frenetic busyness of a beehive knocked on its side. In ones and twos at first, and then in swarms, Sutter’s employees abandoned their work and raced off to find gold. “To all appearances,” wrote a gardener caught in the rush, “men seemed to have gone insane.”

  A young, slick entrepreneur named Sam Brannan—destined one day to be California’s richest man—detonated the explosion that grabbed San Francisco’s attention at last. Brannan was charming, crooked, tireless, a fast talker and big drinker perpetually in pursuit of another woman, another deal, another dollar. Never satisfied with “enough” when “too much” was an option, Brannan happily put his own twist on Ben Franklin’s maxim that “God helps them that help themselves.” He was a classic American con man and also a genuine business visionary who saw which way every game was headed before anyone else had done more than scratch his head in bewilderment.

  In retailing and real estate, hotelkeeping and newspaper publishing, Brannan seized opportunities, or created them. At a time when San Francisco was only a village and Sacramento barely more than a muddy landing at a river junction, for instance, he snatched up much of the prime real estate in the future metropolises. He paid almost nothing and reaped a fortune when the crowds poured in.

  Brannan had arrived in San Francisco two years before the first gold strike, in July, 1846, only twenty-seven years old but already a natural leader. Religion, not commerce, had led him to California. A new convert to Mormonism, Brannan had chartered a ship called the Brooklyn and set out from New York as the leader of a party of 238 Mormons in search of a haven from persecution.

  From the time Joseph Smith had founded their religion, in 1828, Mormons had been sneered at for their odd views, resented for their “clannishness,” and feared for their political clout (they tended to vote as a group). The dislike had turned violent. Vigilante mobs had set Mormons’ houses ablaze and tarred and feathered their leaders. At the Haun’s Hill Massacre, in Missouri in 1838, seventeen Mormons had been killed and fifteen wounded. In Illinois in 1844, a mob stormed Joseph Smith’s jail cell—he had been imprisoned for plotting treason against the United States—and shot and killed him. Missouri had expelled its Mormons, and then Illinois had as well. In 1846 Brigham Young set out to find a refuge for his people. So did Sam Brannan.

  California, which seemed about as distant from the United States as you could get, looked promising to Brannan from the moment of his arrival. He made the arduous trek to Utah, in 1847, to deliver the good news, but his picture of California’s charms failed to seduce Brigham Young. (California struck Young as too enticing, too likely someday to fill up with non-Mormon newcomers; Brigham Young had reached Utah, seen that the desert would scare away the fainthearted, and proclaimed, “This is the place.”)

  Brannan, undaunted, happily stayed put in San Francisco. Perhaps the Mormons might live in two colonies, with himself as head of the western group? In any case, California needed almost everything, and Brannan set out to provide it, seemingly all at once. He launched a newspaper (this was the Star, edited by young Kemble), built two flour mills, opened a hotel, built one store and made plans for more. California was still nearly empty, but Brannan saw at once that the faster it grew, the more his business ventures would thrive. Like a carnival barker talking at double speed to lure the rubes, he took every opportunity to pitch the virtues of Eden on the Pacific.

  From the start, he looked beyond San Francisco, and early on he spotted the moneymaking possibilities in John Sutter’s fledgling empire. (Sutter himself, “one of the poorest businessmen in the history of capitalism” in the judgment of a recent biographer, would manage to bungle what was truly a golden opportunity.) Sutter wanted mainly to rule his kingdom as he pleased, a pharaoh of the foothills; his fervent hope was that the outside world would keep its distance, so that his private empire could hum along undisturbed and unchanging. It was one of fate’s heavy-handed jokes to gather a hundred thousand rowdy gold-seekers from across the globe and send them tramping through his fields.

  With its hundreds of employees and remote setting, Sutter’s Fort badly needed a store. Brannan built one. C. C. Smith & Company (named for Brannan’s partner in the venture) offered blankets and boots, knives and rifles, candles, liquor,* molasses, tea, coffee, everything a man could want, though at prices four or five times what he would pay anywhere else.

  The store would play a key role in the gold rush saga. Sometime in April, 1848, one of Sutter’s employees, a teamster named Jacob Wittmer, barged into Smith’s in need of a drink. He ordered a bottle of brandy and spilled something from his pocket onto the bar. “What is that?” Smith snapped. “You know very well liquor means money.” Drinks were cash only; no credit allowed. Wittmer did know that. “That is money,” he said. “It’s gold.”

  Then the world knew. So Sutter told it later, at any rate, but the tale was almost surely false. Sutter was one of those cheerful souls who changed his stories to suit the audience and the occasion. Facts were encumbrances best thrown overboard.

  Quite likely Sutter himself was the first to spill the secret. Apparently he gave in to temptation on a February evening in 1848, after dinner at the fort. Only a few weeks had passed since Marshall’s discovery. Sutter gathered a few of his men around a table and carefully unfurled a rag he’d hidden away. A few flecks of gold spilled out. A moment’s doubt gave way to jubilation. “Gold, gold, gold, boys, it’s gold!” one man shouted. “All of us will be rich. Three cheers for the gold!” Sutter produced a bottle of wine, and the celebration began.

  The world beyond Sutter’s Fort had not yet heard the news. In early April, Henry Bigler, still with “gold badly on the brain,” visited two friends working a sandbar at a nondescript bend in the American River, about fifteen miles downstream from Sutter’s sawmill. Soon that magical stretch of rock and gravel would be famous the world over, known in honor of its discoverers as Mormon Island.*

  The men at Mormon Island had scarcely any tools, but those few
were enough. Lacking even pans, they scooped up sand and gravel into willow baskets made by the local Indians and added a little river water. Then, time and again, they swirled the water in gentle circles so that it sloshed over the basket’s rim, carrying some of the light grit with it and leaving the heavier contents behind. When a basket was nearly empty, they spread out the residue—which might include bits of gold—onto empty flour sacks to bake in the sun. Many times they did not even have to bother with baskets. With knives, and, astonishingly, with their bare hands, they winkled out pebbles of solid gold.

  Mormon Island changed everything. Even a glimpse of gold could start a man daydreaming, and here was gold in such abundance that it set the heart pounding. And that was only part of the story. What was truly marvelous was that this new, rich site had nothing to do with the first one, at the sawmill, except that the two stretches of riverbank looked like each other. More to the point, they looked like countless other spots, too. If there was gold here, why not gold there? And there, and there?

  Word quickly reached Smith at his store. Smith wrote to Brannan, his partner. One week later, on May 12, 1848, a one-man parade careened down San Francisco’s Montgomery Street. Sam Brannan waved his hat in one hand and brandished a bottle full of gold dust in the other. “Gold!” he shouted. “Gold! Gold from the American River!” (Brannan had prepared for his parade by buying up every pick and shovel in San Francisco, for resale later.)

  The city emptied as if a bomb had gone off. “A fleet of launches” left San Francisco, wrote one eyewitness, and headed up the Sacramento River to the goldfields. Within weeks, three-quarters of the houses in town were left empty. Abandoned ships littered San Francisco Bay.

  In Monterey, the state capital, no one heard the shouting, or much of anything else. In the East, news traveled by telegraph, at lightning speed; in California the hundred miles from San Francisco to Monterey represented nearly as vast a distance as it had a century before. California in 1848 had no bridges across its rivers, no roads between its towns. The only wagons were carts with solid, wooden, Flintstone-style wheels a foot thick, cut from oak trees. An ax-hewn tree branch jammed through holes gouged in the wheels served as an axle. Every cart carried a pail of thick soapsuds to lubricate the axles, and the shriek of wood on wood pierced the air.

  Rumors of gold finally drifted into town on May 29, two weeks after Brannan’s parade. Monterey’s response was tepid. “The men wondered and talked, and the women too,” Walter Colton noted, “but neither believed.” Colton served as Monterey’s alcalde, a kind of mayor/judge hybrid, and little in his small community escaped him. Back in March he’d broken news of the Sutter find in the Californian, but now, more than two months later, he found the mood almost unchanged. “Still the public incredulity remained,” he wrote on June 5, “save here and there a glimmer of faith like the flash of a firefly at night.”

  Colton, whose own temperament leaned more to cool skepticism than to fiery passion, sent a scout to the goldfields to investigate. He left on June 6. Two weeks later, on June 20, he returned. A crowd surrounded the messenger and his horse, jostling for a closer view. The man dismounted, reached into his pockets, and withdrew two clenched fists. He opened them to reveal golden nuggets.

  The crowd clamored for a touch, and the gold made the rounds. “The blacksmith dropped his hammer,” Colton wrote, “the carpenter his plane, the mason his trowel, the farmer his sickle, the baker his loaf, and the tapster his bottle. All were off for the mines, some on horses, some on carts, and some on crutches, and one went in a litter.” Colton was mayor of a ghost town.

  The Californian, which Colton had founded only two years before, declared itself out of business. “The whole country,” it proclaimed, “from San Francisco to Los Angeles and from the sea shore to the base of the Sierra Nevada, resounds with the sordid cry of ‘gold! GOLD!! GOLD!!!’ while the field is left half planted, the house half built, and everything [else] neglected.” As a result, the Californian declared in its May 29, 1848, issue, “It would be a useless expenditure of labor and material to continue longer the publication of our paper.”

  Kemble, the young editor at the Star who had mocked the gold rumors, held out for two more weeks. Then he, too, closed his newspaper, and set out for the goldfields. The final edition consisted of a single page. “We have done,” wrote Kemble, when he saw that there was no one left to print the paper, or to read it. “Let our word of parting be, Hasta Luego.”

  Sailors and soldiers quit their posts without taking the time to shout “So long!” and raced to make their fortune. “Three seamen ran from the Warren, forfeiting four years’ pay,” Walter Colton wrote in his diary in July. “A whole platoon of soldiers from the fort left only their colors behind.”

  Soldiers and sailors had pledged to do their duty, but they had never imagined a test like this. “The struggle between right and six dollars a month and wrong and seventy-five dollars a day,” one soldier noted, “is rather a severe one.” In any case, the risk of prosecution seemed nil. “No hope of reward nor fear of punishment is sufficient to make binding any contract between man and man upon the soil of California,” lamented the commander of the U.S. naval fleet in the Pacific. The navy gave up on posting men to California, knowing that anyone near the goldfields “would immediately desert.”*

  In San Jose, the constable looked on miserably as everyone in town raced to the goldfields, leaving him to watch over the ten prisoners in his jail. Unwilling to set the men free (two had been charged with murder), he resolved his dilemma by marching the inmates to the goldfields and putting them to work for him.

  By the Fourth of July, 1848, great stretches of the once bucolic American River looked like shantytowns, home to scores of ragged tents and scruffy men. Two hundred Mormons now worked the sand and gravel of Mormon Island. Sam Brannan was there, too. Canny as ever, he was among the first to see that the real money was in “mining the miners” rather than in hefting a shovel oneself.

  Brannan made the rounds of his fellow Mormons, demanding tithes to support their brethren laboring to build a new Zion in Salt Lake City. With more and more miners finding more and more gold, his tax quickly proved more lucrative than even the richest site along the river. Soon after, Brigham Young sent Brannan a letter bearing curious news. Brannan’s tithes had not arrived in Utah! “A hint to the wise is sufficient,” Young advised. Brannan missed the hint and kept the money.

  CHAPTER THREE

  HEADLONG INTO HISTORY

  EVERYONE WHO ABANDONED THEIR familiar life and headed west knew they had done something daring. But they never imagined—no one racing to California imagined—that the gold rush would turn out to be, in the words of the historian Kevin Starr, “both Iliad and Odyssey.” It would be an Odyssey because California was so remote and hazardous a destination. Travelers risked cholera and death by starvation. They died of thirst in the deserts and froze to death in the mountains. If they chose not to venture across America but to take a shortcut through the swamps of Panama or Nicaragua instead, they faced malaria and yellow fever. If they went by sea, they risked fire and shipwreck.

  It would be an Iliad because the reality that slapped the gold-seekers in the face, when they finally reached California, smacked more of warfare than of dreams come true. The war pitted man against nature, which turned out not to be so eager to yield up its riches after all, and man against man, for the goldfields were primitive, violent, and lawless. Murders and lynchings were commonplace, shootings and stabbings even more frequent, disease and drunkenness all but universal. In a land where fortunes were won overnight and squandered just as quickly, men’s moods skittered across a spectrum of ecstasy, envy, and despair. Within six months of reaching California, one ’49er in five lay dead.

  Once they had committed to go to the goldfields, people talked as if they had never had a choice, as if they had been poleaxed by fate. “Gold fever” was the constant refrain, and the tone implied that it truly was a fever that left its victims del
irious and disoriented. “I took the fever,” a Cape Cod man named Stephen Wing wrote in his diary, “which for a few months was intermittent in its character, but at the close of the year it became seated, and I had it hard.”

  People had always daydreamed, but words like “adventure” and “wealth” and “choice” had been abstractions. No more. Now fantasy had been made flesh. With the coming of the gold rush, the American Dream took on vivid, pulsing shape.

  Even the most sober observers found themselves bowled over. “What seems to you mere fiction is a stern reality,” one California official wrote to the secretary of the navy, in Washington, D.C. “It is not gold in the clouds, or in the sea, or in the center of a rock-ribbed mountain, but in the soil of California, sparkling in the sun and glittering in its streams. It lies on the open plain, in the shadows of the deep ravines, and glows on the summits of the mountains.”

  Better yet, California’s climate was easy. Best of all, the territory was wide open—nine days after gold was found at John Sutter’s sawmill (and before word of the discovery had leaked out), Mexico handed California to the United States as part of the settlement of the Mexican-American War. With Mexico no longer in the picture and the U.S. government not yet on the scene, California was open to all comers, a free-for-all competition with no rules, no authorities, no taxes, and with prizes beyond calculation.

  Nor was that all. Elsewhere in the world, gold finds had been small, confined affairs. In the Sierra foothills, the band of gold-rich quartz veins that the miners dubbed the Mother Lode stretched a breathtaking 120 miles. That meant two things, and each was hugely important. First, there was a lot of gold. Second, since the gold was spread so widely, no single man or group could grab it all for himself.

  In 1854, near the brand-new town of Melones—named for the melon-shaped bits of gold found nearby—California miners dug up a single hunk of gold that weighed a breathtaking 195 pounds. So colossal a find was nearly impossible to fathom. A single ounce, at $20, was as much as a workman in the East might earn in two or three weeks. The original find that had set the whole world racing to California was a nub half as big as a pea.