Days of '49/Chapter 1

On a morning in the latter part of January, 1848, James Marshall, who was superintending the construction of a sawmill for Captain Sutter in the wooded frontier of a remote country called California, walked half idly along the ditch of the tail-race. About a foot of water was running in the ditch. Something glittering on one of the spots laid bare by the crumbling of the bank attracted his eyes. He thought it was an opal, a stone of no particular value and quite common.

"Do you know, " said Marshall a few days later, "I positively debated with myself two or three times whether I should take the trouble to bend my back to pick up one of the pieces, and had decided on not doing so, when farther on another glittering morsel caught my eye. I condescended to pick it up and, to my astonishment, found that it was a thin scale of what appeared to be pure gold."

Once detected, gold appeared to be anywhere, everywhere. The workmen, Mormons and Indians, in Sutter's employ who had previously noticed nothing, now began to pick gold up from under their feet, filling bottles and pouches, scraping dust and nuggets from crevices. A small boy washed out fourteen pounds of gold in two days.

"What surprises me, " said Captain Sutter, "is that this country should have been visited by so many scientific men, and that not one of them should ever have stumbled upon these treasures, that tribes of Indians have dwelt in it for centuries, and yet this gold should never have been discovered. I myself have passed the very spot above a hundred times during the last ten years, but was just as blind as the rest of them."

Not only had the keen-eyed trappers stumbled across it blindly, but gold hunters in search of gold had crossed and re-crossed this wealth without seeing what they trod upon. Nearly every exploration party that entered the State passed over this ground. An able Swedish mineralogist, in the employ of the Mexican government, was the guest of Captain Sutter and examined the gold fields himself without seeing the gold.

Something of this mysterious elusiveness persisted after gold seekers swarmed over the land, many of them expert miners and geologists from all parts of the world. The best of these miners and scientists accomplished less than the loutish and ignorant grubbers. Negroes, Dutchmen and drunken sailors were proverbially lucky; but at a time when new diggings were being found daily, and for ten years afterward, not so much as one rich discovery was made by a man of a high education as a miner or geologist.

James Marshall was the pathetic figure that Destiny most used and misused. An odd fate seemed to invest his careless words with charmed luck for gold hunters. When the first of the miners came rushing up, so eager to dig on the very spot where gold was discovered that they would have scraped the ground from under the sawmill itself, Marshall sent them haphazardly scurrying off, this way and that. As the original goldfinder, his directions were accepted oracularly. They followed his carelessly pointed finger and found gold.

Marshall himself not only discovered gold at Coloma, but at Placerville, one of the richest of all the diggings; and he was, or claimed to be, responsible for the discovery of gold in Australia. A man named Hargraves came to Marshall's sawmill one day for lumber, and being down on his luck, cursed California bitterly.

"See here, my friend, " said Marshall, half amused, "if you don't like this country, why do you come here? Nobody invited you. Nobody will cry if you take yourself off. Go home and dig for gold. I warrant you I could find the stuff in Australia."

The miners were quite superstitious about Marshall's opinions. Hargraves in great earnestness asked—

"Do you really think so?"

"I am sure of it, " said Marshall.

"If I thought so, I would go, " said Hargraves, broodingly. He went. He discovered gold. As a reward the British Government gave Hargraves 5, 000 pounds and the Australian Government gave him 10, 000 pounds.

Marshall was twice nearly lynched by miners who thought he knew where more gold could be found and would not tell them, for he pretended to knowledge he did not have. He found gold hard to get for himself and heavy to hold. He lived poorly and, forty years later, died in poverty alone in a cabin at Coloma; and he was buried there, within sight of the spot where he had casually picked from the gravel the tiny nugget that so permeated history with its influence as to change the course of empire, the destiny of nations.

Sometime, somehow, the gold would surely have been found, have filled the world with its fever; but a favoring destiny seems to have directed its discovery at a time most fortunate for the United States.

England, France, Russia and the United States knew that Mexico had only a very weak hold over the Spanish California; and all of them plotted to acquire the territory. If they had suspected gold, the furtive chess-like maneuvering of the diplomats would probably have become a game played with armed men.

The discovery of gold was made, almost to the day, a year after the decisive battle which, during the Mexican war, established the Americans in California. As it was, just seven days after the American flag was raised at Monterey, then the capital of California, a British man-of-war arrived to take possession of the country.

The real wealth of California was unsuspected; the United States made hardly more than a trivial show of force and won the territory. From one small part of this territory during the next fifteen years a billion dollars worth of gold was taken, and into it emigrants came by the thousands and hundreds of thousands.

Captain Sutter and Marshall had planned with their men to keep the discovery a secret.

Legend has it that a small boy gave a partly filled bottle of gold dust to one of Sutter's teamsters, who, at the first opportunity, undertook to see if this stuff supposed to be gold was really worth anything by offering it to a storekeeper in exchange for brandy. The storekeeper was agitated. Word got about from mouth to ear. Trappers and traders in the neighborhood set off for Coloma.

Vague reports drifted through the wilderness and disturbed the lassitude of the Spanish village, San Francisco, a hundred and fifty miles away.

The thrilling news spread far and wide, world-wide. It came at a time when farm hands in the Eastern States thought themselves well paid with $12 a month for work from daylight to dark; when $1 a day was a good wage for a laborer; when $2, 000, a year was a fine salary or business profit; when the man worth $10, 000 was well off, the man with $30, 000 rich. The news, confirmed by official reports and letters, told of a land, free to all comers, where any man, with only pick, shovel and pan, could gather gold, pure gold, by the handful.

The Military Governor of California, on August 17, 1848, reported to Washington:

"A small gutter, not more than a hundred yards long, and two or three deep, was pointed out to me as the one where two men had a short time before obtained $17, 000, worth of gold. Hundreds of small ravines are to all appearances yet untouched. The most moderate estimate I could obtain from men acquainted with the subject was that upwards of 4, 000 men were working in the gold district, of whom more than one-half were Indians, and that from $30, 000, to $50, 000, worth of gold, if not more, were daily obtained. No capital is required to obtain this gold, as the laboring man wants nothing but his pick and shovel and tin pan, with which to dig and wash the gravel, and many frequently pick gold out of the crevices of rocks with their knives, in pieces of from one to six ounces."

These reports were widely circulated, translated the world over, discussed and believed.

Sober-headed people got the idea that California was a place where gold could be picked up like fruit in an orchard, and from all parts of the world men broke into a stampede for the gold fields.

Steamship companies sold thousands of tickets when they had accommodation for hundreds only. Families by the thousands took to the covered wagons and streamed out across the plains. It is said that since the Crusades there has never been such a wide-flung pilgrimage toward one spot, and all who went hurried desperately. Footprints and bowsprits from every city and port in the world pointed toward California—a word of arbitrary coinage, taken from an ancient Spanish novel, in which it appears as the name of a fabulous island, rich in gold and precious stones; and in many parts of Europe the only maps that could be found did indeed show California as an island.

Every class and caste from every nationality, almost from every locality, was represented in the pell-mell rush that came trampling across the plains, and in the ships where people were jammed and crammed, often on short rations, usually sleeping on planks for berths, or the deck itself.

Men abandoned farms, stores, families, and started for the mines. Long emigrant trains, heading for Oregon where great tracts were offered to settlers, abruptly turned southward, The famed exodus of '49 almost depopulated many towns and counties from Missouri eastward. Indians, the desert, cholera, destroyed thousands of emigrants, but tens of thousands pressed on over a trail strewn with abandoned household goods, wagons, bones of cattle. Many who did not join in the first rush were later made feverish by the sight of prodigious nuggets brought from California and exhibited, their value being compounded by an admission fee. Crowds, mobs, gathered to gaze upon this gold, gold in lumps bigger than a man's head. The French government purchased one such nugget, disposed of it by lottery and with the proceeds sent thousands of Frenchmen to the mines.

Almost anything that would float was fitted out in the Atlantic ports to carry gold seekers. Steamboats, paddle-wheelers, nearly flat-bottomed, were taken from lakes and rivers and sent around the Horn.

Seven hundred and sixty vessels, many of them rotten tubs, cleared from American ports in '49 and '50, loaded with gold hunters, and rounded the Horn. Most of these voyages were made in the Antarctic winter. Some ships lay for weeks, hove-to in storms on the roughest passage of the globe. All were overcrowded. Nearly all came into San Francisco with food exhausted and pumps working, but they came in. A strange benevolence attended the Argonauts of the Cape Horn route; not one of the seven hundred and sixty vessels that put out for California was lost.

It was popularly thought that the shortest and easiest way to California was to cross the Isthmus and take passage from Panama. Transportation companies encouraged this opinion, and directed the stampede across what was then perhaps as deadly a locality as any on earth.

The Isthmus was so fever-infested that a clause in each life insurance contract taken out by an emigrant stipulated that the policy was void if the insured spent the night at Chagres, the port of entry. All travellers and goods had to be trans ported part way up the Chagres river in small boats, then packed by mules into Panama. It seemed to be always rain ing. There were no hotels en route; there was little food, ex cepting such as emigrants carried with them. Men slept in wet blankets on the wet ground and died like sick dogs. Those that lived did not always pause to bury the dead.

The emigrants piled up in a restless, gambling, quarreling mob at Panama, with every man eager for the steamers that came infrequently, and which when they did come could not begin to carry all the passengers that held tickets. Many, impatient to reach California before all the nuggets were picked over, put to sea in small boats. Others turned back, disgusted and homesick, toward the States. Great numbers, their money exhausted by the expenses and pleasures of Panama, were stranded and could neither go on nor turn back. Like flies in winter, men died; but from all over the world other men swarmed to the Isthmus.

San Francisco was but little more than a Spanish village of adobe bricks, with a growth of ramshackle buildings at the edge of the bay where the few American traders, that dealt chiefly in hides and tallow, received and stored goods from ships that discharged cargoes at improvised wharfs and on the mud flats.

In the summer of '48, San Francisco had gone helter-skelter to the mines. The newspaper suspended. Editor and printer had gone for gold. Storekeepers shut up shop, tacking on the door the scrawl, "Gone to the mines." The butchers, the bakers, the candlestick-makers all went. The city was empty, deserted. When the San Franciscans began to drift down from the hills again they found that their village had become the port of adventurers from every nation.

Ships without pilots rode over the bar of the Golden Gate, and some were run aground on the mud flats. Crews did not always stay to furl sails, but scrambled ashore and made off for the mines. Another crew could not be found, for no one wanted to leave the land of gold. At one time more than five hundred vessels that had been abandoned by their crews lay helplessly at anchor. Some ships were run aground and used for a time as store rooms or lodging houses. The shoveling down of the sand hills went on, and the hulk of more than one vessel that rounded the Horn now lies buried a mile from the waterfront.

Every class and condition of men and women came, and continued to come; all were eager, excited, restless, reckless; they had to be clothed, fed, housed, outfitted, entertained.

Speculators sent cargoes upon cargoes of merchandise. Goods were piled in the streets, and prices varied like the numbers of a lottery wheel and almost as rapidly. Flour was sometimes a dollar a pound, and at other times flour, two hundred-pound sacks of it, was dumped into the mudholes to improve the street, along with kitchen stoves, and bales of tea, or whatever else happened to be heavy on the market. A sidewalk was made from Montgomery street to the mail steamer office with boxes of first-class Virginia tobacco, containing one hundred pounds each, that was soon worth seventy-five cents a pound. Tobacco was at one time found to be the cheapest material for the foundation of small buildings.

Everything was a gamble. Prices and values whirled, soared, fell, rose again. In the autumn of '48 a citizen died, insolvent to the amount of $41,000; his administrators were delayed in settling his affairs, and real estate advanced so rapidly that less than a year later, when all his debts were paid, his heirs had a yearly income of $40,000.

The most conservative business was intensively speculative, for no one knew what ship with what cargo would come on the morrow; and when goods came there was no place to store them, so auctions were held on every hand, simultaneously, at times all day long, often at night amid the smoky flare of torches.

Tents and houses grew overnight like mushrooms. Lumber was at one time more than a dollar a foot. Houses were made of dry-goods boxes, muslin and canvas. In hotels the partitions were of muslin. Rents were incredibly high. Any room twenty by sixty feet would rent for $1,000, per month. Desk room at the end of a counter was a hundred dollars a month; big buildings brought a rental of $15,000 per month; bunks on an enclosed porch brought $21 a week, and in lodging houses space was chalked off on the floors for guests.

Life was intense and changing. No contracts were made for more than a month; buildings were rented and money loaned at ten per cent. by the month. Thirty days was a San Francisco year, and in that time its people lived a full round year. Property often changed hands twice a day, and in three years the city was burned five times.

Each time thousands of men were ruined, but the smoldering wreckage was trampled out by other men busily rebuilding their city, larger and more splendidly. The work of permanent construction went on through all the hurly-burly of boisterous recklessness and extravagance. Hills were tumbled into the bay; the pestilential marshes were filled; wharfs were built; iron buildings were put up, only to collapse more dangerously than wooden walls under the touch of fire. Bricks were brought around the Horn, and the cost of building with them was at first a dollar a brick. Stone was brought from China and Australia to make stores that would stand through a conflagration, but did not.

It was a helter-skelter city, bursting with crowds. The streets were littered with empty cans, bottles, old clothes. Few men owned baggage. When a new garment was bought the old one was thrown into the street. Laundry was $12 the dozen, big and little, at a time when a glutted market offered shirts at $10 the dozen. It was found cheaper and more convenient to send laundry to Honolulu, and even to China, crossing the Pacific Ocean twice, to be cleaned.

The streets, saloons, gambling houses, were filled night and day with picturesque people. Strangers bumped against each other and became partners before they had told their names. On every side were bearded miners with the clay of the hills on them, wearing bright sashes and high-topped boots. Revolvers and bowie knives were as much a part of their dress as hats.

At a time when all men were armed and dangerous, a society of young hoodlums, mostly discharged soldiers, a bit fantastic of dress, calling themselves "Hounds," terrorized respectable citizens, levied contributions on shopkeepers and robbed foreigners; and often they paraded the streets, singing and shouting, with abandoned women on their arms. The citizens were so preoccupied with the whirlwind of speculation that for a time these same Hounds declared themselves to be the regulators of the city.

Gamblers, fastidious, in clean linen, dressed in black, without change of expression and never a gesture of haste, unless meaning to shoot or stab, sat behind heaps of gold, taking any bet from any man at any time. There was no limit, excepting the last flake of dust that the gambler had in his bank.

Spanish Californians mingled everywhere with the crowds; some of them poor, others richly clothed, with high-crowned glazed sombreros, short jackets of velvet overlaid with em broidery, wide sashes, serapes, rows of gold buttons down their slashed-bottom trousers—with drawers showing through the slash.

Frenchmen, Chinamen, Kanakas. Gaunt plainsmen, with eyes narrowed from much staring into the western sun which they had followed half way across the continent. Trappers in fur caps, with long rifles in their hands. Indians, Germans, Englishmen, Jews. Every type and creed and race and caste and class: lawyers, merchants, teamsters, soldiers, sailors, judges, men who had served in Congress, preachers—some of whom turned card gamblers and bartenders while others worked as laborers or preached like prophets in the very door ways of gambling houses.

There were men who knew their classics as a gambler knows his cards that shined the boots of other men. In this topsy-turvy land where each scrambled for what he could get, scholars turned laborers and ditch-diggers became capitalists. Count Raousset de Boulbon, of filibuster fame, who prided himself on royal blood, admitted that for a time he had worked as a wharf laborer. There were Southern gentlemen, fire-eaters in black hats, with negro body servants, gamblers of the tin-horn stripe, harlots and a migratory flock of Sydney ducks.

Newcomers flocked in from the sea and miners swarmed down from the hills. Excitement and wealth gave impulse to every form of excess. There were generous virtues and generous follies. Gold poured upon the city and was passed from hand to hand, recklessly. Life was cheap and murders were unpunished; in the first four years there were twelve hundred murders and but one conviction. Quarrels and fights flared up through the crowds;men were killed nightly in the gambling houses, and the play about the table scarcely paused. At times men stood in the undried blood of those who had died, and went on betting.

But mostly all men were in moods of rollicking good nature. A lucky miner would shake the last dust from his pouch to hire a band to play while he called up a crowd around a barrel of whisky set out in the street for all comers to drink his health. All were strangers in a strange land. All were free of speech, free-handed and, with a kind of mirth, jeered at discomfort. Comic signs were stuck in the deepest mudholes:

though during the winter rains horses and even men drowned in these mudholes.

For months after the rush began there were few homes; merely shacks, tents, bunkhouses where men slept; barren lodging houses, a score of men to the room. Saloons and gambling houses were the city's rendezvous; and these, beginning in adobe buildings and tents, within a short time grew into great barn-like rooms or circus tents, their floors laid with rich carpets, their walls glittering with costly mirrors or oil paintings, mostly of nude women.

The city gathered every exotic ornament that a ship could bring from the Orient or Europe. Orchestras played night and day. "Home, Sweet Home" was a favorite melody. Comedians jigged and sang. Women danced to the thundering clap and stamp of women-hungry men. Coarse women from the foreign slums, dainty daughters of sin, dangerous leopard-like women, who had played with princes and ruined them; bloodsucking and passionately reckless women of all the races that have among them women of Rahab's calling came into the city; and also, quietly in the more secluded parts of the city, gathered the home-makers, wives who had crossed the plains, women who had brought their hearthstones around the Horn, mothers of the men who were to be the Sons of California. Women, beautiful and wanton, opened houses of carnival. Women, pretty as the proprietors could hire, whatever the wage, tended bar and lured men into the throbbing uncertain ties of monte.

In a city where lonely men trampled one another's feet for standing room, a woman was a woman; and where few had virtue, none were condemned.