USA > California > A history of the new California, its resources and people; Vol I > Part 8
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Tuthill says that with the first news of gold San Francisco's streets were deserted, its business was stopped, its infant commerce paralyzed. If a pestilence had swept the Peninsula depopulation could scarcely have gone . on faster. Everywhere, and from other little villages, the people were fiy- ing eastward and northward to the rich foothills of the Sierra Nevada. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Californian issued an extra in which it apologized for the non-appearance of its regular number. "The whole community," said the editor in his farewell, "resounds to the sordid cry of 'Gold!' "
In 1849 from 25,000 to 50,000 immigrants from the east and Europe arrived overland or by sea. Charles Lummis, editor of Out West, estimates the number at 47,000. The yield of gold during 1848 was about $5,000,- 000, but it reached $23,000,000 during 1849, $65,000,000 during 1853 and to-day it is about $12,000,000 a year.
The transformations wrought by the great discovery in the lives and fortunes of men from all parts of the globe were not greater than those
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worked upon the small communities of the territory, upon the people them- selves, and upon the great metropolis destined to grow where San Francisco now stands.
The pitfalls of mining camps, the evils of suddenly acquired wealth, the abandoning of the ordinary restraints and manners of men, these, and the coming of gamblers and desperate characters, were some of the evils to be met and dealt with. California was from that time "to be morally and socially tried as no other community ever has been tried, and that trial was to show both the true nobility and the true weaknesses of our national char- acter."
But, on the whole, the real problems came rather slowly, considering the magnitude of the discovery at Sutter's Mill. There were few miners in the country, however, and not until Consul Larkin's report to Buchanan and Colonel Mason's letter on mineral conditions-based on his investiga- tions during June and July, 1848-was there much confidence or much excitement throughout the east. The awakening came with the records of the revelation, and the character of the state to-day was formed very largely by those that came during the yesterday, the golden yesterdays of '49.
On June 17 Governor Mason left Monterey to visit Caloma and oth- er points on the American river for the purpose of verifying the reports of gold discoveries, and by the time he had finished his researches he sent a glowing account to the war department. In this he stated that the hills had gold for the gathering. He said: "I have no hesitation in saying that there is more gold in the country drained by the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers than will pay the costs of the late Mexican war a hundred times over. No capital is required to obtain the gold, as the laboring man needs 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 crev- ices of rocks with their butcher knives, in pieces of from one to six ounces."
It is not strange that those who had opposed Polk's Mexican war policy ridiculed the entire story as fictitious, yet the report was actually true. The governor's report recited the well known facts about the desertion of towns and ships, the rotting of the crops, the fabulous prices of flour and pro- visions, the high wages of laborers, and all that goes with mining camp days. In one place the sun shone warmly upon two hundred miners work-
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ing for gold-some using tin pans, some Indian baskets, and some rude cradles. The people at work in another place were digging out from one to three ounces a day. One man had made ten thousand dollars net in less than a week. Men were abandoning wages of fifty dollars a day because they could do better elsewhere by mining on their own responsibility. Three miles above Sutter's the governor met a Mr. Sinclair, who employed fifty Indians for five weeks and showed net proceeds worth sixteen thousand dollars. About four thousand men-half of them Indians-were then work- ing in the gold belt. Crime was then almost unknown. Men lived in open tents with thousands of dollars worth of dust in their possession, yet they were not molested. Robberies and murders were reserved for a later and more civilized phase of existence.
It is not at all wonderful that such a report, presented to congress as a part of the report of the secretary of war, stirred the country like an alarm cry, and it is not wonderful that thousands got the "gold fever" and worked themselves up to the belief that the precious metal existed not only in the crevices but that it grew on the bushes. The grand rush to California be- gan in earnest as soon as this news was published to the country .*
In 1842 Professor Dana, the eminent geologist, saw gold rocks and veins of quartz near the Umpqua river, in Oregon, and he found pebbles of similar character on the Sacramento river, but his discoveries were for the most part inconsequential and were put to academic rather than to prac- tical uses. None of his announcements in any way hastened the real dis- covery of gold.
Within a month after Marshall's discovery, however, and before the news of it had become general, an armistice was agreed upon between Mex- ico and the United States, and a treaty of peace was ratified by both na- tions by May. The news of this convention was celebrated enthusiastically in California by illuminations, cannonading and gay processions.
*Note .- Though gold was discovered by Marshall, as stated, and though his discovery marked the real importance of mining, the reader should not imagine that gold and silver were unknown at a far earlier period of history. Tuthill satisfied himself that gold was discovered on the San Francisquito Canon, forty-five miles northward from Los Angeles, in 1838. The mine was worked for ten years and it yielded an average of six thousand dollars a year. He reports that silver was discovered in Alizal, Monterey county, in 1802, and gold was found in San Isidro, San Diego county, in 1828. Hakluyt's account of Drake's visit-1579-tells of large quantities of gold and silver, but the probability is that the stories of that time were large exaggerated, though there may have been a basis for the assertion.
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Within a few months after the ratification of the treaty the entire east was aflame with the newvs, and enthusiasm for gold-hunting seized the peo- ple like a fever of the blood. The call to round the Horn or cross the plains was heard and responded to by all sorts and conditions of men, and even conservative people sacrificed their homes, their business, or their posts of duty to brave the unknown perils and fortunes of the great and compara- tively unknown west. The desire to begin life anew permeated the breasts of the most phlegmatic, and a few weeks filled the dusty roads of the mid- dle west with hopeful thousands, who trudged their way toward the land of the setting sun. It was usual to travel in companies, particularly when overland parties were making the long journey.
Not only did the eager gold-seekers start by land, but all sorts of craft-river steamers, old whaling vessels, and unseaworthy hulks, were pressed into service for the voyage by sea. Thousands braved the perils of the Isthmus of Panama, and thousands died of Chagres fever or from the countless hardships of the undertaking. Those who reached San Francisco hurried on to the mines, if they had money and grit, or found high wages and prompt pay if they feared or were unable to venture farther. Twenty and thirty dollars a day was common pay for ordinary work. Houses were brought around the Horn in parts, and some of the residences in the Santa Clara Valley, in San Francisco, and elsewhere are pointed to with pride to-day as having made the tour around Cape Horn. The growth of San Francisco was so fast that it was known as the "City of Magic."
The autumn of 1849 and the spring of 1850 was the free-and-easy era of California history, the time when men in tents and rude cabins threw off the "knapsack of custom" and rollicked in perfect abandon. Gambling and other vices throve-and it was the conditions that grew up in these times that made great problems for society to solve later.
Under these strange, new circumstances soon grew from a small vil- lage a great city of industry. Tents and temporary houses sprang up like mushrooms, and eager multitudes continued to rush in through the Golden Gate or overland. Fortunes were literally made and lost in such periods as a month, week, even in a day. Nuggets of varying sizes continued to be found in large numbers for several years, but the severe search soon plucked the richest bearings. and then the quartz mills began to thrive, as in later
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years. Men settled down to the quieter callings of life, and the hot youth of the great rush was spent.
One of the pathetic phases of the grand discovery is that neither Mar- shall nor Sutter reaped any benefits from the revelation they made to the world. Good-hearted, somewhat visionary and deficient men, they came to want in their declining years. Lucia Norman thus portrays their fate:
"Strange to say, neither Marshall nor Sutter reaped any of the benefit of the discovery of gold. Marshall was of a thriftless, unsettled, and some- what dissipated disposition. Most of his life, after the discovery, he spent in prospecting for new deposits of the precious metal. At the present writ- ing (May, 1883), he is still engaged in that occupation, residing, in com- parative poverty, in a rude cabin at Kelsey, a place six miles from Placer- ville, El Dorado county.
"The discovery of gold ruined Sutter. It caused a stampede among his employes, who fled into the mountains in search of gold, took his horses, and left his crops to rot for want of harvesters, and his cattle to the mercy of thieves. Sutter also caught the gold fever. He set those Indians that remained with him-about two hundred-to dig for gold in the American river, but the enterprise was not successful. It cost more to supply imple- ments and provisions than the value of the gold he obtained. Gold-hunters were generously fed by him by the thousands, as they pushed on to the mines. His hospitality was, nevertheless, frightfully abused. He was rob- bed again and again. It is said that in 1849-50, $60,000 worth of stock was stolen from him by one party. The timber and grass on his lands were cut and carried off without compensation to him. He was deprived of his land by claimants who seized it 'under new laws and new circumstances,' and he was never able to recover it through the courts. In 1851 he ran for governor on the Whig ticket, but was defeated, and he then retired in comparative poverty to his Hock farm, a small and undisputed possession on the west bank of the Feather river, with the empty title of a General of Militia to comfort him. Afterward Sutter became a pensioner on the state, receiving as such $250 a month, in recognition of his services and his sac- rifices. But in 1868 the pension was stopped, and Sutter repaired to Wash- ington to push his claims for compensation for the loss of his property be- fore Congress. For twelve years he continued in the rôle of an unsuccess-
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ful petitioner, and, overwhelmed by disappointment, died in poverty in June, 1880."
Marshall's death, soon after the time spoken of by the writer, left lit- tle but regret for his friends. Though his bronze monument will long grace the parks and museums it is rather pitiful that his last years were years of want and years of black memories.
In the bustling throngs that came west were many thousands whose sole purpose was to make hostages with fortune, as Bacon says, and return home. Throughout the east to-day one will find many old men who were birds of a single season. The many thousands that remained-some be- cause too poor to leave, others because too prosperous and content-were the ones that had placed upon their shoulders the problem of founding a state, and it was not long until they began to carve a government from the rude surroundings and the mixed population. It is superfluous to say that they brought the prejudices of northern and southern men, the passions and prejudices of the time. In the building of the state the Democrats got well under control by 1851, and remained in power until the war. In Benton's speeches in the United States senate one gets an idea of the strange con- ceptions of statesmen, for the immortal Benton went to great pains to show that the gold mines would prove worthless, but he went to equal pains to prove that if the territory of California should become a state it would not disrupt the Union.
The first official act looking to the establishment of a state government for California was the issuance of a proclamation on June 3, 1849, by Brigadier-General Bennet Riley, U. S. A., the then military governor of the territory, "recommending the formation of a state constitution or a plan for a territorial government." The convention was made to consist of thir- ty-seven delegates, to be chosen as follows: District of San Diego, two delegates; of Los Angeles, four; of Santa Barbara, two; of San Luis Obis- po, two; of Monterey, five; of San José, five; of San Francisco, five; of Sonoma, four; of Sacramento, four; and of San Joaquin, four.
The election for delegates was held on August 1, 1849. The con- vention met in Colton Hall, in the town of Monterey, at 12 o'clock M. on Saturday, September 1, 1849, and adjourned on Saturday, October 13, 1849. The convention admitted to seats quite a number of delegates in ex-
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cess of those contemplated in the proclamation of General Riley. On organ- ization the following were chosen officers of the body: President, Robert Semple; Secretary, William G. Marcy; Assistant Secretaries, Caleb Lyon and J. G. Field; Reporter, J. Ross Browne; Sergeant-at-Arms, J. S. Hous- ton; Doorkeeper, Cornelius Sullivan; Interpreter and Translator, W. E. P. Hartnell; Clerk to Interpreter and Translator, W. H. Henrie. The Con- stitution framed by the convention was adopted by the people at an elec- tion held November 13, 1849.
Soon after the adoption of the sovereign law of the land the people of San Francisco and other parts of the state-but of San Francisco in par- ticular-were confronted with problems of disorder and anarchy that led to the forming of the famous vigilance committees that have made the country famous ever since the era when they administered a rude form of popular justice. With those stirring events the following pages will deal.
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CHAPTER VI. THE REIGN OF DISORDER.
ANTECEDENTS OF THE VIGILANCE COMMITTEES OF 1851 AND 1856-How AN ORGANIZATION KNOWN AS THE HOUNDS CAUSED THE ORGANIZED FORCES OF SOCIETY TO DEAL SUMMARY JUSTICE IN PIONEER DAYS- THE KILLING OF JAMES KING "OF WILLIAM"-PRELIMINARY STUDY OF FACTS THAT LED TO THE DEALING OUT OF SO-CALLED POPULAR JUSTICE.
Much falsehood has gone abroad regarding the social life of California -particularly of San Francisco-during the first decade after the discov- ery of gold. It is known to all who have studied the question, even super- ficially, that lynch law now and then ruled mining camps, often with a reck- less hand; that mobs dealt from suddenly improvised courts quick and sum- mary judgments on the misdeeds and alleged misdeeds of men, but it is not known that the provocation was in some instances so great as to move the most conservative citizens to indorse the irregular proceedings of those perilous times.
That San Francisco startled the world with its vigilance committees of 1851 and 1856, also by its dealings with the ruffians of 1849, is like- wise commonly known to the world. But the admitted facts have now and then been so grossly misrepresented as to put the early builders of the city and the state in the light of desperadoes, and it is to correct some of these impressions, as well as to hold the committees responsible for some de- linquencies, that the subject is introduced at this time. Let it be a consola- tion to those members of the committees who still live and to their friends and defenders that the calm and far-away verdict of some of the world's greatest newspapers-and this in the conservative newspaper days of half a century ago-inclined to justify much of that which was done off-hand, and while the people were suffering from gross evils.
In the pages following these explanations Mr. Charles James King gives a clear account of the Vigilance Committee of ·1856, which was organ-
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ized to avenge the felonious killing of his father, then editor of the Bulle- tin. Mr. King's interpretation of the events that have long been of im- portant historical value is the interpretation of a strong defender of the acts of the Committee. He could not, of course, argue otherwise than that so great an outrage as the murder of his father merited speedy punish- ment.
Following Mr. King's graphic description of the stirring and unfor- tunate events that robbed him of his father is presented the other side of the · shield, the case as set forth by the late James O'Meara, a pioneer journalist and a sharp critic of the Vigilance Committee. The double statement en- ables the reader to have an impartial presentation of the great story of San Francisco's struggles to establish respect for the laws.
In advance of reading either account, however, the reader should know certain facts essential to an intelligent understanding of the situation that preceded the drama enacted in 1856. It is, therefore, necessary to go back nearly seven years-for the nucleus of later events found origin in pioneer days.
The first uprising of any importance was in July, 1849. A band of ruffians called the Hounds (and they named themselves) organized, as they pretended, for self-protection in the mining districts. They announced that they were opposed to cheap foreign and native laborers. To carry out their alleged plans they established headquarters in San Francisco, where they assumed the task of "regulating" society. Now and then they committed deeds of violence, such as tearing down the tents of Chileans, beating inof- fensive people, and carrying away goods and merchandise by force. July 15, 1849, fell on Sunday, and that day the Hounds became unusually bold. Returning from a picnic in Contra Costa county, they boldly marched through the principal streets to the Chilean quarters at Clark's Point. There they tore down tents, beat the owners and occupants, plundered them, and even fired upon their frightened victims.
The fair-minded public was fired to indignation, the alcalde called a public meeting at Portsmouth Square, a popular part of early San Fran- cisco. At that meeting Samuel Brannan, a hot-tempered leader of those days, addressed the crowd. He urged that it was necessary to do some- thing radical to suppress the Hounds. In truth everybody knew that the
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purpose of the meeting was to take vigorous measures against that organ- ization, and the members had already begun to take flight or to prepare to leave on a moment's notice. As an evidence of their humanity the audience subscribed a generous fund for the relief of the plundered Chileans, and thirty men enrolled themselves as special constables to make a sort of man- hunt for the Hounds. Before night twenty of the miscreants had been arrested and locked up on the United States ship Warren, there to await trial by the Committee. The defendants were tried before a popular judge, ten of them were found guilty and sentenced to imprisonment, but the . judgment of the court was never put into execution. The result of the raid and conviction was effective, however, for it broke up the organization of Hounds.
Just here one obtains a clear idea of the unsettled state of society when it is remembered that the Hounds. during the period of their un- bridled strength, were in the habit of visiting stores and taking whatever they desired. Old citizens often have told me that these ruffians would walk away with merchandise, saying in an impudent tone, "Charge this to the Hounds." It is not remarkable that there was a glad response to the call to suppress the organization. It is also of passing interest to say that these desperadoes were permitted to live in the sand dune region, though they were known to be criminals from New York and various Aus- tralian ports. That they feared the popular verdict was shown by their cowardly flight toward San José when they realized that the public con- science had experienced an awakening and that retributive justice was like- ly to pursue them.
It should be said that there was a great fire in San Francisco in De- cember, 1849. The burned district was soon rebuilt, however, and few people were sorry that the conflagration had come upon the city. There was a second fire on May 4, 1850. The losses were great, for the dis- aster destroyed three million dollars' worth of stores and warehouses. A third fire occurred June 14, and on September 17, 1850, there was yet another serious blaze. By that time people were becoming suspicious of incendiaries. On June 22, 1851, there came a great fire that destroyed many residences. It is known in history as the poor man's fire.
Now, from the outset many citizens believed that the fires were the
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work of desperate criminals. In addition to this fact, there were many mutterings that wretches were being allowed to go unwhipped of justice. All the pioneers with whom I have talked are free to say that conditions were bad. In a history published by the illustrious Anton Roman, though he was not the author of it, these statements were made:
"The rapid influx of immigrants, of which thirty-six thousand are esti- mated to have entered San Francisco in this single year, the loose state of public morals and of government-rendered San Francisco a perfect pandemonium. The sun rose upon vessels from every port discharging their cargoes of miscellanous wares and of people. All day it beheld the masses of humanity crowding the long wharves, filling the streets, strug- gling, battling, drinking, and gambling wildly: looking with unpitying eyes on a corpse covered with blood, joking with the murderer, or hurrying him with frantic execrations to the jail. And at night the scene was scarcely less strange. Men wandered up and down the sand hills, eagerly seeking shelter ; or gathered in the brilliantly lighted saloons, or, perhaps beggared and forlorn. lay part thinking of home or breathing out their last sighs unheeded.
"This was the daily and nightly life of San Francisco and of the dis- tant mining camps. Still, withal there was some good in California; her treasures were not all squandered in vice. Among so many, it would have been strange if no men of wisdom and worth could be found. There were a few; and these became the saviors of San Francisco.
"Early in 1851 the glaring abuses of the city government again at- tracted attention ; and not even the excitement occasioned by rumors of dis- coveries of great value at 'Gold Bluffs' and elsewhere could turn the pub- lic from their local duties.
"Robberies and murders were far too frequent, and too openly winked at by those in authority, to admit of longer delay.
"Over five thousand people collected around the city hall, declaring that murder should no longer go unpunished. For thirty-six hours the excitement continued, and the mob continually increased in numbers. A jury was impaneled, and several men were arrested, tried, and sentenced to be hanged. They were, however, suffered to escape.
"Two or three months later, the Vigilance Committee again took the
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power into their own hands. Daily murders, robberies, and incendiarisms they considered demanded their interference with the slow and lenient process of the law."
During this absence of justice.from the courts crime held its own, and more than its own, in the city. On February 19, 1851, a merchant of the name of Jansen was assaulted, wounded, and robbed by two men. The public and the press were indignant, for the attempted murder was the cul- mination of a long train of like iniquities that had gone unpunished. The Alta, a leading newspaper, said editorially : "How many murders have been committed in this city within a year? And who has been hung or punished for the crime? Nobody. How many men shot and stabbed. knocked down and bruised; and who has been punished for it? How many thefts and arsons, robberies and crimes of less note; and where are the perpetrators ? Gentlemen at large, citizens, free to re-enact their outrages."
When it is said that the Alta was considered a cool and very conserva- tive publication one may understand somewhat of the temper of the times and the provocations endured by the people.
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