The Rush Page 6

  lsrael Lord, Jennie Megquier, and the others knew almost nothing of what the trip west would entail, except that it would mark an end to their old way of life. In the winter and spring of 1849 they took their place in a vast, hopeful procession swarming by land, wallowing by sea, and lurching blindly into the future.

  Though they did not know it, these countless travelers were headed to a transformed world. Walter Colton, now without his paper but still mayor of Monterey, found himself marooned with the military governor and one Lieutenant Lanman, a military officer. “Our servants have run, one after another, till we are almost in despair,” wrote Colton, “… and this morning, for the fortieth time, we had to take to the kitchen and cook our own breakfast.” Colton painted an almost unthinkable scene. Imagine, he wrote, “a general of the United States Army, the commander of a man-of-war, and the Alcalde of Monterey, in a smoking kitchen, grinding coffee, toasting a herring, and peeling onions!”

  Colton saw the big picture as clearly as the ludicrous details. “These gold mines have upset all social and domestic arrangements in Monterey,” he wrote. “.… The master has become his own servant, and the servant his own lord. The millionaire is obliged to groom his own horse, and roll his own wheelbarrow; and the hidalgo—in whose veins flows the blood of Cortes—to clean his own boots.”

  In California the old order had collapsed. Astonishingly, the rest of the United States had done its best to slumber through the revolution. For seven months after Marshall’s discovery of gold, newspapers in the East carried not a word about it. When the first mention finally came, it was not an attention-grabbing shout but a mumble of “fire” in a crowded theater. On August 19, 1848, the New York Herald ran a long, rambling article with the mundane headline “Interesting Narrative of the Voyage to California, by a New York Volunteer.”

  The author was a soldier who had enlisted to fight in the Mexican-American War but arrived too late to see any action. He had meandered around California instead. He reported on the sights in San Francisco (a fine harbor but “only a few shantees or camp-like cabins”), the traits of Mexicans (“generally lazy, fond of riding, dancing, and gambling”), and the price of beef and flour. Then, finally, a mention of gold. “I am credibly informed that a quantity of gold, worth in value $30, was picked up lately in the bed of a stream of the Sacramento.” The goldfields seemed extensive, the writer went on, and the gold near the surface. Perhaps it was not too much to entertain “golden hopes.”

  Readers missed the story or dismissed the news. Over the course of the next month, newspapers carried more reports of California’s gold, each a bit more excited than its predecessors. More shrugs. “This writer has visited the golden country… in comparison to which the famous El Dorado is but a sandbank,” one correspondent told the New York Herald on September 17, 1848. “There are cases of over a hundred dollars being obtained in a day from the work of one man. It requires no skill. The workman takes any spot of ground or bank he fancies; sticks in his pick or shovel at random; fills his basin; makes for the water, and soon sees the glittering results of his labor.” Still no one bit.

  A week later, the Cleveland Plain Dealer carried an even more exuberant letter from Walter Colton, who was not only the alcalde of Monterey but also a U.S. Navy chaplain and therefore an especially trustworthy figure. “I have just been conversing with a man who in six days gathered $500 worth,” Colton wrote. “.… There are probably now not less than 5,000 persons, whites and Indians, gathering this gold.”

  Colton, born and raised in the East, had come to know California firsthand, and he could scarcely convey its grandeur to those still stuck at home. “You reckon by acres, and we here by miles and leagues. Your sheep produce one lamb in a year—ours always two, and often four. Your streams have a few minnows in them, and ours are paved with gold!” This was harder to ignore. But while many wavered, few jumped.

  One key problem was that the newspaper was the nineteenth century’s main source of news, and no one trusted newspapers. For good reason. Editors routinely used their publications as megaphones to denounce one another or anyone else who happened into view. The tone was personal and vituperative, and a writer’s talent for malicious insult was as admired as a fighter’s ability to throw a big left hook. Walt Whitman, the editor of the New York Aurora before he turned to poetry, showed just how far a writer could go. Whitman described a rival editor, the New York Herald’s James Gordon Bennett, as “a reptile marking his path with slime wherever he goes, and breathing mildew at everything fresh or fragrant; a midnight ghoul, preying on rottenness and repulsive filth.” Bennett exercised no more restraint. In an editorial in 1840, he called the pope “a decrepit, licentious, stupid Italian blockhead.”

  That rowdy, even scurrilous style was new. In their early days, newspapers had been dull affairs that made their money largely from paid subscriptions. Column after dreary column carried transcripts of political speeches, in full, or shipping reports. Then steam power came along, in the 1830s, and suddenly newfangled presses could spit out papers cheaply, quickly, and by the thousands. Editors slashed their prices to a penny and fought for street sales. Newsboys shouted headlines of murder and scandal. Reporters competed for scoops, or invented them.

  In 1835, for instance, the New York Sun reported on page one that the most renowned astronomer of the day, Sir John Herschel, had aimed an enormous new telescope at the night sky and discovered life on the moon. And not just any life, but herds of miniature buffalo roaming the plains and graceful blue unicorns cavorting on the hillsides (the females could be recognized by their long tails). Most impressive of all, Herschel had seen humanlike creatures, both male and female, equipped with “wings composed of a thin membrane, without hair, lying snugly upon their backs, from the top of their shoulders to the calves of their legs.”

  The Sun presented the hoax completely straight-faced, in the original article and in five followups, and never apologized. Almost a decade later, in 1844, nothing had changed: the Sun carried another invented but supposedly true story, this one by Edgar Allan Poe, describing the first-ever crossing of the Atlantic by balloon.

  By the standards of the day this was entertainment rather than scandal. Hype was the great American art form. The bigger and stranger the story, the better. At his American Museum, on Broadway in New York City, P. T. Barnum drew enormous crowds who lined up for the chance to see “industrious fleas, educated dogs, jugglers… albinos, fat boys, giants, dwarfs,” as well as full-sized wax statues depicting the Last Supper, and “Santa Anna’s Wooden Leg, taken by the American Army in Mexico.”

  Some of Barnum’s exhibits had a measure of truth to them—General Tom Thumb was in fact only forty inches tall (though he had been found in Connecticut, not brought “at great expense” from Europe); Joice Heth was an elderly black woman (though she was not the oldest woman in the world, age 161, and had not been George Washington’s nurse). For spectators the fun was in sorting out what, if anything, to believe. One of Barnum’s greatest draws, the dried-up and lifeless “Fejee Mermaid,” turned out not to be a mermaid at all but a fish sewn to a monkey’s body. All such spectacles drew breathless newspaper coverage. Against a backdrop of endless hype and hot air, stories of men jabbing randomly at the ground and finding nuggets of gold hardly stood out.

  Through September and October of 1848, then, everyone read the news from California, and everyone found some reason to reject it. This was newspaper nonsense, to sell papers. It was speculators’ windy talk, to lure hicks to California. It was political hype, to justify the Mexican-American War by talking up the value of the worthless land that Mexico had handed over to the United States. Over the years people had heard dozens of impossible claims and the excitement never came to anything. Why should this time be different?

  But even if no individual newspaper report carried much weight, the dispatches kept coming, week after week, month after month. Every story echoed and re-echoed. Every whisper grew into a shout: someone—but not you—
was somewhere—but not here—and making a fortune.

  It was easy to brush aside a rumor or two. Two dozen thrilling rumors made a person think.

  The moment when thinking and hesitating came to an end, and a mad, nearly universal desire to hit the road began, can be dated precisely. The East finally woke not to the sound of trumpets or alarm bells but to the rousing notes of a speech by the president of the United States. As rousing, at any rate, as any words could be when spoken by so slight and drab a figure as James K. Polk, “a smaller than life man with larger than life ambitions,” in the words of one biographer.

  Polk chose the occasion of his State of the Union speech, on December 5, 1848, to proclaim the startling news from California. His leap toward drama fell characteristically short. Well into a two-hour address, he totted up the reasons why the unpopular and recently concluded Mexican-American War had been a good idea. Among “the great results which have been developed and brought to light by this war” were a million square miles of new territory, including part or all of today’s Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Texas, and Utah.

  Polk painted rosy pictures of each new acquisition. Even sleepy California would soon hum with commerce. Nor were California’s fertile fields and spacious harbors its only virtues. Americans had heard rumors about finds of “precious metals” in California, Polk went on, but they might not have known what to make of the stories.

  He proceeded to tell them. “The accounts of the abundance of gold in that territory are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service.” Stiff and stilted language, but that was beside the point. Every listener could translate Polk’s words for himself—It’s true! All the rumors you’ve heard are true. Polk might as well have flung an arm in the air and waved a golden nugget for all to see.

  Two days later, Washington did almost precisely that. Two messengers racing from California reached the capital with a tea caddy containing 230 ounces—over 14 pounds—of new-mined gold. The precious cargo was put on display in the library of the War Department. Crowds rushed to see for themselves and stared, goggle-eyed, at the golden flakes and pebbles. Even reporters, cynics by inclination and training, could only gape. “Any goose who could talk of ‘mica’ after seeing these specimens would not be worth noticing,” the New York Tribune declared. “It is no more like mica than it is like cheese.”

  The headline in the New York Herald on December 10—“Ho! For California—Gold! Gold!”—blared out the message that the time for doubt had passed. The Herald hammered home the point by retelling the best-known of all stories of foolish skeptics. “When the incredulous apostle saw the prints of the nails in the hands and feet of his master, he believed in his identity. So the skeptic, with regard to the gold stories that come teeming in from Alta California, will have his doubts extinguished in a visit to the library of the War Department.” There he would see actual gold from California—gold flecks, gold pebbles, gold lumps—and he would believe. In a religious age, no argument could have carried as much weight as this brief parable.

  In Philadelphia, the mint assayed a sample of the haul. Eventually they would prepare a full report, stuffed with numbers and jargon. But in the meantime Philadelphia sent the secretary of war a summary that did not call for a scientific education. The mint’s one-word telegram: “Genuine.”

  The president’s speech and the War Department’s gold all featured in every newspaper story. “The Eldorado of the old Spaniards is discovered at last,” the New York Herald exulted on December 9, 1848. “We have now the highest official authority for believing in the discovery of vast gold mines in California… the discovery is the greatest and most startling, not to say miraculous, that the history of the last five centuries can produce.”

  A minister in Illinois, thrilled almost beyond words by “the official announcement of the astounding facts,” likened the impact to the newest force he could think of. The president’s speech had “moved the whole Nation, as with an electric shock.”

  New songs, like “Hurrah for California,” captured the euphoria.

  O! Won’t it be a glorious time

  when gold runs down like water,

  And nobody won’t have to work

  and nobody had oughter.

  The Declaration of Independence had given Americans the right to pursue happiness. The gold rush promised them the chance to catch it.

  PART II

  JOURNEY

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SWARMING FROM ALL OVER

  ON THE MORNING OF April 2, 1849, “at 9 A.M. sharp, by order,” a regiment of young men in splendid uniforms tensed in anticipation of their leader’s signal. J. Goldsborough Bruff surveyed his men one last time. All was well. “My Company was paraded, armed and equipped… on the pavement of Lafayette Square, opposite to the White House,” Bruff noted contentedly. Now it was time to call on the president.

  In hindsight, Bruff’s proud words—his talk of orders and precise starting times and his proprietary references to his Company—foretold rebellion and trouble down the road. And in time, as the company stumbled its weary way along, dissent would turn to rebellion and then to disaster. But for the moment, all was hope and glitter. Trumpets blared, and Bruff and his fellow gold-seekers broke into columns of six and marched in step to the White House. (In the mid-1800s the White House was open to the public to a degree that is inconceivable today. The era of an ever-vigilant Secret Service lay nearly a century in the future, and Americans took to heart the common description of the White House as “the People’s House.”) Bruff and his men looked dazzling in their gray coats with golden buttons ornamented with an eagle, gray pants with a black stripe, and caps carefully set just so. Each man carried a rifle, a pair of pistols, a knife, and a hatchet.

  The company formed a row, rifles in parade position. Bruff and his fellow officers strode up the steps, where they were granted a brief audience with Zachary Taylor, the president himself. (Polk had served only a single term and then died in June, 1849, just in time to miss the tumult he had unleashed.) Bruff, never a man troubled by shyness, “explained the situation and circumstances” to the president, he wrote later, “and informed him of the strength and character of my Company, its destination &c.

  “As we were on the eve of an extraordinary journey, of great extent,” Bruff told President Taylor, “and which must be fraught with arduous trials, seasoned perhaps with a due quantum of perils, and that most probably many of us would never again have the pleasure of greeting him, I considered it a duty to make the call, bid him farewell, and [offer] our fervent wishes for his continued good health.”

  The president “expressed regret that there had been no pre-announcement of our visit,” Bruff conceded. If he’d had time, he might have prepared his own speech. As it was, Taylor shook Bruff’s hand and wished him and his men well.

  Taylor’s bemused response did nothing to undermine Bruff’s bubbling eagerness. His men all shared it, and so did the thousands of others swarming toward the “jumping off” points for the journey west or clamoring for berths on ships bound for the goldfields. For months, they had debated whether to go or stay put. Now they had leapt into the dark.

  Emigrants are always the most hopeful members of their set, the ones willing to leave behind everything familiar on the chance that the new will be better than the old. Those who headed for California, tempted not by vague visions of a better life but by firm expectations of hillsides strewn with golden nuggets, took that customary optimism and multiplied it tenfold. And, in their own minds, they weren’t leaving home forever, just detouring long enough to pick up a fortune. That made the picture even rosier.

  Every corner of the United States waved farewell to its gold-seekers. More came by land than sea at first, though the numbers in both groups were vast. In 1849 alone, five hundred ships bound for California set sail from Boston, New York, New Orleans, and the other p
ort cities of the United States. Elegant barks with billowing sails, sturdy brigs and swift schooners, hastily refitted whalers and cargo ships, worm-eaten wrecks long since retired, and smoke-belching steamers with colossal paddle wheels all took to the seas. And from tiny hamlets across all thirty states, from Louisville, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and every city worthy of the name, emigrants headed overland toward Saint Joseph, Missouri, and Council Bluffs, Iowa, and the handful of other western towns that served as the last outposts of civilization before the trip proper.

  Luzena Wilson and her husband, in their log cabin in Missouri, never hesitated. “When we talked it all over,” Luzena recalled, “it sounded like such a small task to go out to California, and once there fortune, of course, would come to us.” The “of course” was telltale. When she looked back many years later, Luzena shook her head at how heedlessly—almost exuberantly—she and her husband had cast their old lives aside. “We never gave a thought” to selling our land, Luzena recalled, “but left it, with two years’ labor, for the next comer.”*

  In New York City, festive crowds gathered at the piers to wave goodbye to the young men who had booked passage to California. Fathers, mothers, and sweethearts cheered and wept and waved their handkerchiefs like semaphores. The adventurers on shipboard shouted till their throats burned. One departing traveler, almost quivering in his excitement, threw a five-dollar gold piece toward shore, shouting, “I’m going where there is plenty more.”