USA > California > A history of California: the American period > Part 20
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44
"My messenger has returned with specimens of gold; he dis- mounted in a sea of upturned faces. As he drew forth the yellow lumps from his pockets, and passed them around among the eager crowd, the doubts, which had lingered till now, fled. . .. The ex- citement produced was intense; and many were soon busy in their hasty preparations for a departure to the mines. The family who had kept house for me caught the moving infection. Husband and wife were both packing up; the blacksmith dropped his hammer,
228
A HISTORY OF CALIFORNIA
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. An American woman, who had recently established a boarding-house here, pulled up stakes, and went off before her lodgers had even time to pay their bills. Debtors ran, of course. I have only a community of women left, and a gang of prisoners with here and there a soldier, who will give his captain the slip at the first chance."
On June 28, Thomas O. Larkin, still serving in his consular capacity, wrote Buchanan :-
"Three-fourths of the houses in the town on the Bay of San Francisco are deserted. Houses are sold at the price of building lots. The effects are this week showing themselves in Monterey. Almost every house I had hired out is given up. Every black- smith, carpenter and lawyer is leaving; brick-yards, saw-mills, and ranches are left perfectly alone. A large number of the volun- teers at San Francisco and Sonoma have deserted; . . . public and private vessels are losing their crews . . . Both of our news- papers are discontinued from want of workmen and the loss of their agencies; the Alcaldes have left San Francisco, and I believe Sonoma likewise; the former place has not a justice of the peace left."
Governor Mason, who made a tour of the mines about the time Larkin's letter was written, along the whole route found mills lying idle, houses deserted, fields of standing wheat turned open to cattle, and farms left unculti- vated. Ships were deserted as fast as they arrived on the coast; soldiers left their garrisons, and men closed their shops. Until, without serious exaggeration, one writer could say,
"The whole country is now moving on to the mines. Monterey, San Francisco, Sonoma, San José and Santa Cruz, are emptied of their male population. ... Every bowl, tray, warming pan, and pigin has gone to the mines. Everything in short that has a scoop in it that will hold sand and water. All the iron has been worked up into crow-bars, pick axes and spades."
229
THE GOLD RUSH
This wholesale stampede from the coast to the mining regions is not to be wondered at. In those first exciting days, especially before the great influx of 1849, gold awaited every comer. Stream beds, hillsides, and rock crevices, all alike yielded treasure.
Two men in seven days obtained $17,000 from a trench a few feet wide and a hundred feet long. A soldier on twenty days' furlough, who spent half his time going to and from the mines, made $1500 in ten days of actual min- ing. Seven Americans, with the aid of fifty Indians, whom they paid presumably in cheap merchandise, took out 275 pounds of gold in a little more than six weeks. Ten men made $1500 each in ten days. A single miner obtained two pounds and a half of gold in fifteen minutes. A group of Mexicans were seen gambling, with a hundred pounds of gold dust and nuggets serving as the "bank." In less than half an hour a man picked between five and six ounces of gold "out of an open hole in the rock, as fast as one can pick the kernels out of a lot of well cracked shell barks." A rancher named Sinclair, employing Indians as helpers, cleaned up fourteen pounds (avoirdupois not troy) in a week's time. On a tour of the mines the editor of the Cali- fornian, which had recently been established at Monterey, averaged $100 a day, using only a shovel, pick, and pan.
The striking thing about the mining industry as it was carried on for the first few months, however, was not the lucky finds of a few; but the assured profit for practically every one who engaged in it. The average return was from $10 to $50 a day, and by August it was reliably esti- mated that $600,000 had been secured from the various "diggings."
Authoritative news of the phenomenal discovery reached "the States" in time for President Polk to comment upon it in his December message to Congress. But sometime before this official announcement, the eastern newspapers were full of rumors and reports about the California gold fields, which the public generally accepted with tolerant incredulity. When at last, however, people ceased to doubt
230
A HISTORY OF CALIFORNIA
and began to believe, such excitement followed as the nation had never known before, or will ever know of its kind again.
By the close of 1848 every city, large or small, from the frontiers of Missouri to the Atlantic seaboard, was affected by the California fever. Men were selling out their business, families were breaking up their homes, officials were resign- ing their positions, and professional men were getting rid of their practice. Literally scores of companies and associa- tions were being formed by persons planning to make the trip to California. Many of these were organized on a cooperative basis, each member contributing a certain share to the common expense and enjoying equal rights with his fellow members. Other companies were financed by persons themselves unable to make the journey, but who wished to share in the fabulous wealth that every letter and returned traveller reported from the California fields.
Thus, there was the Sag Harbor California Mining Associ- ation, the Boston and California Mining and Trading Joint Stock Company (with Edward Everett as its patron), the New York Yellow Fever Mining Company, the Man- hattan-California Overland Association, the Congress and California Mutual Protective Association, and no one knows how many other companies of the same kind. Yet few, if any, of these innumerable associations were able to stand the strain of the passage to California, or of the new environment their members found in the mining camps. Too often, friendships or mutual agreements, formed in an atmosphere where social and business relations followed a well defined code, were wrenched apart and hopelessly broken by the new conditions of life in California.
Naturally enough, the newspapers seized upon the gold excitement with the greatest avidity. Letters, reports, and rumors from California were eagerly sought after and given first place in the news columns. Fortunately, no matter how great the exaggeration in these articles, the actual production of the fields in nearly every case surpassed the imagination of the writer, and fiction again "lagged
231
THE GOLD RUSH
after truth." The reports from California that appeared in the newspapers were also supplemented by many by- products of the craze.3 There were advertisements of businesses for sale, because the owners were leaving to search for gold; there were descriptions of the various over- land routes to California, and lists of stout and trustworthy vessels about to sail for San Francisco. Notices of gold dust receipts at Atlantic ports stood side by side with accounts of villains who had abandoned wives and families for the mines.
A single issue of the New York Herald contained over forty advertisements designed to interest buyers about to leave for California. Among the articles advertised were an Acid and Test Stone Appliance for detecting Gold; Hunt's Patent Gold Extracting Engine; Bruce's Hydro-Centrifugal Chrysolyte, or California Gold Finder; and other essentials of a similar character. Lamps, guaranteed against upsetting, were advertised on the same page with "Books for Pleasant Reading on Ship Board." Mining treatises, Spanish Gram- mars, and guide books for the route were almost as numerous as Buena Vista rifles, pistol belts, and holsters. "Who is for California? "-a company in the process of organization challenged; and in the next column a physician offered his services to a party bound for the Pacific Coast. The New York Washing and Mining Association advertised for re- cruits, and another enterprising company sought a house- keeper for its California hotel. Preserved meats, soups, spiced oysters, and sauerkraut put up in canisters and warranted for twenty-one years, saddles, guns, tents, assay- ing outfits, blankets, India rubber goods, Dana's System of Mineralogy, and California overcoats were all brought to the attention of the prospective miner. He was implored to buy a copy of the Chrom-Thermal System of Medicine,
3 About this time Mrs. Elizabeth Farnham, widow of the well known author-traveller, Thomas Jefferson Farnham, who had died in San Francisco in 1848, was seeking to organize a party of 130 women in New York to go to the coast, in com-
pany with six or eight respectable married men and their families, to become the wives of bachelor miners. None of the party were to be under twenty-five years of age, and each was to furnish $250 as expense money for the trip.
232
A HISTORY OF CALIFORNIA
since fully half the miners of California were down with fever; and to have his daguerreotype taken as a farewell remembrance for the dear ones who remained behind. About the only items omitted from the list were coffins and nursing bottles.
There is no way of determining, with even a fair degree of accuracy, how many persons came to California from the rest of the United States in the years immediately following the discovery of gold. The migration, however, was so stupendous as to out-rank in point of numbers anything of its kind in the nation's history, and to stand on an equal footing with some of the great world movements of popu- lation. The whole country, it seemed, was singing the doggerel verse of one of the Argonauts, and thousands upon thousands were actually putting it into practice:
"Oh! California, that's the land for me! I'm bound for the Sacramento With the washbowl on my knee."
Throughout the winter, the overland routes were closed to travel; so the earliest influx came by sea. During the first week of February, 1849, fifty vessels sailed from Ameri- can ports for San Francisco. By the middle of March 17,000 persons had taken passage from cities on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts; and before the year closed, 230 American vessels reached California harbors.
The overland migration, when it began, was even larger than that which came by sea. Within three weeks, during the spring of 1849, nearly 18,000 persons crossed the Missouri River for California. A single observer counted eleven hundred wagons on the prairies beyond Independence. From the Missouri frontier to Fort Laramie the procession of emigrants passed in an unbroken stream for more than two months toward the west. By day this long train of wagons and other vehicles (for they were of all types and descriptions), the herds of animals, and the crowds of men, women and children, gave the impression of a whole nation on the move. At night the glow of innumerable camp fires
233
THE GOLD RUSH
on the prairies shone like the lights of populous cities. Fully 35,000 people took part in this great overland move- ment of 1849, a year that rightly occupies a unique place in California and national annals.
The chief sea routes to California were by way of Cape Horn and the Isthmus of Panama. The former, made as it was at first chiefly by sailing vessels (for steam navigation was still in its infancy), required from six to nine months- a much longer time than impatient gold seekers could afford to give-and was characterized by no little danger and hard- ship. Just before the gold rush began, however, William H. Aspinwall had organized the Pacific Mail Steamship Company and started the construction of three small steamers, of about a thousand tons each, to run from New York to San Francisco.
The first of these, the California, left New York on Octo- ber 6, 1848, shortly before Marshall's discovery became known. When the vessel reached Panama, on January 30th, 1849, hundreds of gold seekers, who had come by sea to the Isthmus and crossed overland to the Pacific, were waiting almost in a frenzy for passage to San Francisco. Some 400 of these were taken on board, to find accommodations as best they could in a vessel designed for only a hundred passengers. Many of these paid as high as $1000 for a steerage ticket from Panama to California. The California reached San Francisco on February 28th-the first of a long line of transports laden to the water's edge with new world Argonauts.
Those who reached California by the Panama route had much to try physical endurance and test their patience. The voyage from New York to Chagres, on the Caribbean side of the Isthmus, required about two weeks' time and cost from $80 to $150. If passage could be obtained in a satisfactory ship, this portion of the trip might well prove delightful; but as the number of sea worthy vessels was wholly inadequate to supply the demand, every sort of sailing craft was pressed into service; and even if the vessel escaped foundering in mid-ocean, the passengers were sure to
234
A HISTORY OF CALIFORNIA
suffer every form of discomfort and annoyance to which travellers are heir.
From Chagres, the first stage of the journey across the Isthmus was made by native canoe to the head of the Chagres River, and thence by packtrain to the Pacific. The canoes were twenty or twenty-five feet long, carried ten or twelve passengers, besides the five or six Indians who poled them, and made about a mile an hour-when the natives bestirred themselves. Tropical storms, heat, bad drinking water, and voracious insects added to the pleasure of the voyage. But while these things, coupled even with delay and the squalor of the native huts where the emigrants were often forced to lodge, could be endured, there were two grim enemies that brought death instead of mere discomfort. These were Asiatic cholera and the Chagres fever.
When the coast was reached, another long wait was in store for the Californians. Frequently weeks passed before a passage could be secured to San Francisco. The old city of Panama, witness of so much of tragedy and heroic under- taking from the time of Balboa onward, surely never saw stranger sights than in those bustling days of '49, when the Americans poured down from the crest of the mountains on foot or on mule back, to await the arrival of some long expected vessel to carry them on to the land of El Dorado.
For two years the new comers virtually took possession of the city. Some of the more enterprising set up hotels and opened shops to cater to the needs of their companions.4 Others of different taste even started a newspaper, which outlasted the mushroom community that gave it birth. Many of the more impatient emigrants chartered small sail boats and bravely set out for California without waiting for the larger vessels. And it is even said that some com- panies, more adventurous or ignorant than the rest, actually sought to make the five thousand mile journey from Panama to San Francisco in log canoes! With the adventures,
4 One of the most successful of these emigrant merchants was Collis P. Hunt- ington, of later railroad fame.
235
THE GOLD RUSH
hardships and tragedies of these irregular expeditions there is no space to deal-But what fine gold still remains in the tailings of California history!
Besides the way around South America and across Pan- ama or Nicaragua, there were half a dozen combination routes to California, involving both an overland journey and an ocean voyage. Many of the emigrants sailed from New York or New Orleans to Vera Cruz, travelling thence by way of Mexico City and Guadalajara to take ship on the Pacific at Acapulco or San Blas. Others landed at Tampico and made the trip across Mexico by way of a more northern route to the harbors of Mazatlan and Guaymas on the Gulf. Still others crossed the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, hoping to find a vessel at Salina Cruz to carry them on to California.
At least one thing was common to all of these various routes. Whichever he chose, the gold seeker was sure to encounter hardships in numerous and terrifying forms. Sometimes disease carried off his companions one after another around him; and sometimes an accidental gun shot or willful murder threw the shadow of death over a little camp. Again brigands might strip the company of all its ready money and supplies. Or, failing these misfortunes, there were always cold, flood, thirst, desert heat and scar- city of food to be reckoned with on the overland portion of the expedition. And on the sea, danger from storm, failure of the ship's stores, shortage of water, and sudden attack of the black plague, cholera. A few companies were entirely blotted out by some unknown catastrophe and never heard from again; others escaped similar disaster by grim perseverance, or merely the whim of a kindlier fate.
In addition to the various sea, or sea-and-land routes to California, there were also several principal overland trails, supplemented by many "cut-offs," or diversions from the main routes. The most travelled of these overland routes was the old historic path of the fur trader and the early emigrant-along the Platte, up the Sweetwater, through the South Pass, to Bear River and Fort Hall. Thence most of the caravans turned south to the Mormon settle-
236
A HISTORY OF CALIFORNIA
ment at Salt Lake, entering California by way of the Hum- boldt and Truckee Rivers. Others took the trail to Ore- gon, reaching the Sacramento by the Willamette and Shasta route. Still others, after reaching the Sierras, followed along the eastern slope, through the Owen's Valley, till Walker Pass, or perhaps the Tehachapi, furnished a gateway to the San Joaquin. From Salt Lake others took the recently opened Mormon trail to San Bernardino, a route the Los Angeles-Salt Lake branch of the Union Pacific Railroad now closely parallels.
Another main highway of the gold seekers reached Cali- fornia by way of Santa Fé. From Missouri to New Mexico this route had long been known through the agency of the St. Louis-Santa Fé trade. From Santa Fé westward there was a choice of two routes. One, the old Pattie trail, ran through Socorro and along the Gila to the Colorado, thence crossing to the coast by way of Warner's ranch. The sec- ond, following Wolfskill's path of the early thirties and the route of the old Santa Fe-Los Angeles caravans, reached the Colorado by way of the Grand, Green, Sevier, and Virgin Rivers. From the Colorado the trail continued on to Southern California by way of the Cajon; or east of the Cajon, turned northward to the San Joaquin by either the Tehachapi or Tejon Pass. Still another route from Santa Fé ran directly south to Chihuahua in Old Mexico. Thence one of the long used Spanish trails carried the emigrant across the mountains into Sonora, and eventually brought him by way of Altar and Tubac to the regular Gila River trail over which he travelled to the Colorado.
The magnitude of the migrations over these various overland routes cannot adequately be described. Men, women, and children took part in it; for the movement, at least from the frontier states, was not merely the rush of men excited by tales of wealth to a land where they expected to make but a temporary residence. It was the transplanting of a population, the migration of families to a new and permanent home. Much of the so-called "Great Migration" was indeed merely a new phase of that overland
237
THE GOLD RUSH
movement that had begun in 1841 with the arrival of the Bidwell party, and had already assumed very considerable proportions a number of years before the discovery of gold.
Many parties, of course, even from western communities, were made up entirely of men; but in the typical overland company, the unit was the family rather than the indi- vidual. Nearly every wagon carried furniture and house- hold goods for the new home on the Pacific. For the westerner, who started, let us say from Independence, in the spring of 1849 for the gold fields of California, looked upon the undertaking as nothing unusual, except perhaps for the distance involved. His whole previous life had been spent in just such migrations on a smaller scale. Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, and finally Missouri, each in turn had witnessed the erection of his crude log cabin, evidence of the sure approach of civilization, and had claimed him for a temporary citizen By 1849 this nomadic settler was ready for the final move to California.
The ordinary means of travel employed by the emigrants was the familiar "prairie schooner," probably first made use of in the Santa Fé trade. These were usually drawn by three or four yoke of oxen, though sometimes horses or mules were used instead. Generally a number of cows were also driven along to furnish a reserve supply of food, or to serve as substitutes for broken down or lost oxen. While this was the typical equipment, many of the emigrants had vehicles of other types, or employed pack animals alone. Some indeed were foolish enough to attempt the journey with wheelbarrows and push carts!
Besides supplies of food-coffee, sugar, bacon, dried apples, and the like every well-to-do company took with it a large amount of bedding, many cooking utensils, guns, axes, and even heavy household furniture, such as bedsteads, tables and bureaus, or equally heavy farming implements and mining tools. The organization of most companies was similar to that adopted by the earlier emigrants of the Bidwell-Donner type, and their methods of travel in no material way differed from that of their predecessors. The
238
A HISTORY OF CALIFORNIA
large number of animals passing over the well established routes, furnished a more serious problem in the matter of forage, however, than the pre-Forty Niners had been forced to meet; and this often compelled companies to seek less frequented trails where grass was more abundant.
Indian difficulties were few during the first years of the gold rush, but every other trouble was met with in abun- dance. Cholera ravaged many of the trains, in some cases wiping out entire families. Other diseases, such as scurvy, likewise took heavy toll; and death by accident was also of frequent occurrence. Often a company's animals gave out or ran off. And in crossing rivers, wagons, animals, and men alike were sometimes swept away by flood or sucked down by quicksand. Crime, even of the basest sort, was not unknown; but more commonly where violence was done, it was due to some outburst of sudden anger or resulted from nerves frayed beyond the breaking point by long continued anxiety and strain.
On the northern route, the most difficult part of the jour- ney lay beyond Fort Hall. Between Salt Lake and the Sierras the line of travel was marked, more plainly than ever a modern boulevard was posted by enterprising auto- mobile clubs, with broken down wagons, abandoned equip- ment, dead animals, and bleaching bones. A single entry in the diary of James Abbey, himself one of the Forty Niners, shows better than all the second hand descriptions that have ever been written, what toll was paid on this portion of the route west of the Humboldt Sink:
"August 2nd-Started out by four o'clock this morning; at six stopped to cook our breakfast and lighten our wagons by throw- ing away the heavier portions of our clothing and such other articles as we best can spare. We pushed on today with as much speed as possible, to get through the desert, but our cattle gave such evident signs of exhaustion that we were compelled to stop. . . The desert through which we are passing is strewn with dead cattle, mules, and horses. I counted in a distance of fifteen miles 350 dead horses, 280 oxen, and 120 mules; and hundreds of others are left behind unable to keep up. . . A tan-yard or
239
THE GOLD RUSH
slaughter house is a flower garden in comparison. A train from Missouri have, today, shot twenty oxen. Vast amounts of valu- able property have been abandoned and thrown away in this desert-leather trunks, clothing, wagons, etc. to the value of at least a hundred thousand dollars, in about twenty miles. I have counted in the last ten miles 362 wagons, which in the states cost about $120 each."
With Abbey's description as a background, one's imagina- tion can picture something of the distress and suffering endured by the immigrants who came the northern route.
Yet those who took the Gila trail were equally unfortu- nate. John W. Audubon, son of the famous ornithologist and a naturalist of no mean ability himself, found the road east of the Colorado, "garnished almost every league with dead cattle, horses, or oxen." Every camping place, was littered with wagons, implements, and personal effects thrown away by the passing trains. The worst stretch of this route, however, lay through the Colorado desert west of the Yuma villages. Here, at the so-called lagoons, Audu- bon, who had travelled by the route across northern Mexico, came upon a "scene of desolation" more fearful than any- thing he had previously seen in all his arduous journey. He describes it thus:
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.