USA > California > California; an intimate history > Part 9
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The Americans congratulated themselves until August 28th, when a mounted courier dashed into Monterey crying that all the south was in arms and Gillespie fight- ing for his life in Los Angeles. This proved to be no false alarm, and it took the Americans under Frémont, Stockton, Talbot, and General Kearney, when he arrived overland from Mexico, until January 13th to subdue them. It is not necessary to give in detail those engagements in which the Americans were not always victorious; for the Californians, not being opposed to friends and rela- tions, fought with valor and admirable tactics. But there was no question of the outcome, and on January 13th the entire force surrendered to Frémont, laid down
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THE BEAR-FLAG REVOLUTION
their arms and dispersed. Frémont by his clemency and generosity recaptured his lost prestige and was once more the popular hero. Stockton appointed him "gov- ernor," but by this time Stockton and Kearney were at sword's points over the supreme command in California. The upshot of many broils and the bitter enmity of Kear- ney was Frémont's trial in Washington for "mutiny" and numerous other charges. He was found guilty by the commission, and pardoned by the President; he re- signed from the army, and returned to California to embark upon a political career.
And the Californians? Their day was over, their sun had set. Once more the strong devoured the weak.
VIII
GOLD
SUTTER felt very happy and secure with the Ameri- can flag hanging limp above his fort in the windless valley summer. Although a European born, he had al- ways despised the Spaniards as much as he admired the vigorous enterprising people of the Great Republic. To be sure, he reigned like a prince at New Helvetia, where his domain covered thirty-three square miles, with, just beyond, another vast grant of ninety - three thousand acres. He had thousands of head of cattle, horses, sheep, hundreds of Indians who were veritable subjects; his crops were magnificent in that warm Central Valley, and practically every trade was pursued at the Fort. It is not likely that he dreamed of greater wealth under the Americans so much as of security; for he distrusted Mexico. But he had known the cities and towns of the Eastern states, with their teeming industries, and he longed to see California roused from her lethargy, all her great resources developed. And in a sense he certainly forced the pace of California history.
For several years Sutter had watched the emigrant trains roll down the slopes of the Sierras; and what in- spired a more or less vague mistrust in the minds of the Californians was a foregone conclusion to the clever Swiss. He dispensed hospitality to these weary adven-
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SUTTER'S FORT AS IT WAS IN 1848
GOLD
turers, selling them all the necessaries of life from his stores when they had the money to pay, and giving lavish- ly to the needy. He advised them where to pitch their tents and how to avoid encroaching on the ranchos, enter- tained the more presentable at his board, and sent many a relief party up into the high Sierras when emigrants had been overtaken by disaster.
Hundreds and hundreds of these covered wagons har- nessed to oxen crawled down the mountain-trail during the years 1845-46, most of them from the Middle West, all of the immigrants in search of little farms in the land of climate and plenty. During the following two years, as if in obedience to the law of nature that sends the lull before the storm, the numbers fell off; but there was one party destined to live in the history of California at least, and its name was Donner.
This was a party of eighty-five people-men, women, children-that had started early enough to cross the Sierras before the snow fell, but lost time on a false trail and began the eastern ascent on the last day of October, with exhausted provisions. They encountered one bliz- zard after another. The snow buried their wagons and cattle; they built cabins of boughs covered with hides, fearing, in spite of those that pushed on ahead in search of relief, that they must spend the winter in these terrible fastnesses. Relief parties from Sutter's Fort were little more fortunate. They fell coming in, or going out with the few that were able to brave the storms and travel. The winter wore on, the blizzards increased in fury and duration. Men, women, and children died, exhausted or starved. The Sacramento Valley was covered with a brilliant carpet of the California wild flowers of spring
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CALIFORNIA
before the last of the relief parties brought out the last of the ill-fated emigrants.
Donner, like a good captain, had refused to leave his foundering ship until those under his command had been saved. When the second relief party left Donner Lake they took all that were camped at this point except Donner, who was now too weak to travel, Mrs. Donner, who refused to leave her husband, and a man named Keys- burg, who was ordered to remain and look after them. When the snows had melted somewhat a third relief party reached the lake to find Donner laid out in a winding- sheet, Keysburg looking like a gorilla and acting like a maniac, and no Mrs. Donner. They found her later in the camp kettle and a bucket, salted down. When Keysburg, assisted by a rope round his neck, recovered his mind, he confessed to having murdered and eaten portions not only of this brave woman, who had perhaps consciously dared worse than the Sierra storms to console her dying husband, but of others, before the second relief party had come. Nor did he deny the story that a child, perishing with cold, had crept one night into his blankets, and that he had devoured it before morning.
Such law as there was in the country seemed to break down before this monster. A year or two later the Americans would have lynched him; but Sutter, knowing the effect of the terrible stillnesses under falling snow, the monotonies of a long Sierra winter, and the hunger and privation that poison the brain with vitiated blood, let him go. He lived miserably in the mountains for the rest of his life, shunned as a pariah.
Sutter had had men engaged in looking for a site for a sawmill when Frémont arrived and set the country by its
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$
Matras
******
1
11
MARCH OF THE CARAVAN From "The Expedition of the Donner Party." Courtesy A. C. McClurg & Co.
GOLD
ears. Yerba Buena, the immigrants, and various settle- ments springing to life along the Sacramento River de- manded lumber, and the man who supplied them would make a fortune. Sutter, in spite of his baronial domain and his many enterprises, was always in debt, and he would have put this new idea for increasing his revenues into immediate execution had not Frémont carried off nearly all the able-bodied men in the north.
Sutter also wanted lumber for a projected flour-mill from which there would be another fine revenue, but the lumber must be brought from the Sierras. Finally an immigrant from New Jersey drifted in, a wheelwright by occupation, James W. Marshall by name, to whom Sutter gave work, and soon recognized as an honest and indus- trious man, if somewhat surly and erratic. He talked over his schemes for the two mills with him, and the up- shot was that Marshall agreed to find a site and build and manage the sawmill if Sutter would take him into partner- ship. Those were frontier days when one did what one could, not what one would, and articles of partnership were drawn up: Sutter was to furnish money, men, tools, and teams, and Marshall would do the rest.
The point selected by Marshall was in a mountain valley about fifteen hundred feet in altitude; and in August of that year (1847) he started for the Sierras, accompanied by six Mormons, who after service in the Mexican War were on their way back to Salt Lake, but thankful for remunerative work; and ten or twelve Indians. The road across the valley, beaten out by emigrant trains, was about forty-five miles long, but the men rode or drove the wagons, and in the bracing Sierra air were soon at work.
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CALIFORNIA
They were four months felling trees, building the mill and dam, and digging the race. It was shortly after the gates had been put in place and the water had been turned into the race to carry off the loose dirt and rock that Marshall immortalized himself. The water had been turned off one afternoon, and he was walking in the tail-race when he saw something glittering on the bed. He picked up several of the yellow bits and examined them doubtfully. They looked like gold, but-he had also seen pyrites. However, certain tests convinced him that he had at least found an alloy in which gold might predominate. This was on Monday, the 24th1 of January. Several days later he rode into New Helvetia and showed his little collection of golden peas to Sutter. He, too,
AUTOGRAPH OF
Jas , Marshare
OLD SURTEA MILA
THE DISCOVERER OF GOLD IN CALIFORNIA
January 19th, 1848.
AUTOGRAPH OF J. W. MARSHALL, FROM CALIFORNIA'S GOLDEN JUBILEE
was doubtful, but he possessed an encyclopedia. The two men read the article on gold carefully, and then ap- plied the sulphuric-acid test; finally, with the further
1 The mistakes in dates which prevailed for many years were due to the fact that Marshall was old and his memory feeble by the time historians asked him for statements.
I20
GOLD
assistance of scales, they convinced themselves that Marshall's trove was pure gold.
Neither of the men was unduly excited. The gold had been found in the mill-race only, and was probably iso- lated, a mere pocket. At all events, they made up their minds to say nothing until the flour-mill was completed. Sutter now had a number of intelligent men working for him, thanks to the Mormon wayfarers, and he had no desire to lose them.
But, although Nature may keep her golden secrets for several hundred thousand years, man is born of woman. One of Marshall's laborers was sent out every few days to shoot a deer. The gold discovery had interested this man Bigler mightily, and he invariably searched the edges of the streams he passed. He soon became con- vinced that gold was as thick in the Sierra cañons as the sands on the shores of the sea; in less than six weeks Sutter did not have an able-bodied man left at the Fort, and many of his Indians had joined the stampede.
Yerba Buena at this time was not a mere adjunct to the military post at the presidio, but a town of eight hundred and fifty inhabitants, the most important of whom were the American merchants and traders. Be- sides the large importing and exporting firms there were a number of small merchants that supplied the inhabi- tants with all the necessaries of life and did a quiet but remunerative business. The mechanics commanded about two dollars a day. The only excitement was the arrival of mail from the East, and an occasional fight or fan- dango, duly recorded in the two weekly newspapers, the Californian and the California Star. On March 15th the Californian announced casually that there was rumor of a
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CALIFORNIA
gold-mine having been discovered at Sutter's sawmill; and shortly afterward the editor left to get what news there might be, at first hand. He visited the original "mine," escorted by Sutter himself, but returned to tell his pub- lic that it was all a sham, and advised them to stay at home and stick to business. A few weeks later he was forced to close his printing-office, as there was not a man left in Yerba Buena to set the type.
There was no telegraph wire in California, nor even a pony express, but it would seem that the word "GOLD " was carried on invisible waves and shouted into every ear. The large merchants closed their warehouses for want of laborers, and the small ones left their shops in charge of their wives, if they had any, or merely turned the key; mechanics threw down their tools, bought a pick, shovel, and pan and shouted that they'd work for other men no more; farmers left their crops to rot in the fields; the editors followed their printers. The great ranchos were deserted, for even the indolent Californians and their Indians were dazzled by the hope of sudden wealth, or by that subtle and deadly magnetism which emanates from the metal. By July the whole territory was at the mines or marching there, some in the family coach, many on horseback, more on foot, others by sloop to the em- barcadero near Sutter's Fort. The ranch-houses looked like the castles of Europe in the Middle Ages, when all the men were at the wars and the women stayed at home to spin.
For a time the excitement was confined to California. There were rumors in the East; but, long before she took the discovery seriously, the ports of the Pacific, to which bags of gold-dust were sent to buy provisions for the
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YHIGH SEASDE
SHOWINGE Y VESSELES BOUND. FOR. CALYFORNYA.
GOLD
COMPANYE
DA CAPYLAL
PROVISIONALLY REG STERED.
FROM "LONDON PUNCH," 1860
1
THE "EL DORADO" GAMBLING SALOON
GOLD
camps, had recognized the significance of the placer- mines; and Mexicans, Peruvians, Chilians, as well as settlers in Oregon, had begun to pour into California. But Mr. Larkin wrote twice to the Secretary of State, Mr. Buchanan, giving a circumstantial account of the discovery. Before writing the second time he visited the mines and satisfied himself that they were of enor- mous richness and extent. It was already known that the placers extended for miles; and some men were taking out from one thousand to five thousand dollars' worth of gold a day. Mexicans told him that there was nothing so rich in Mexico. Governor Mason also paid a visit to the mines, and estimated that the gold yield was from twenty to thirty thousand dollars a day. The metal was so abundant that many men found their pickaxes, shovels, pans, and cradles superfluous, and pried it out from the crevices of the rocks with their jack-knives. These re- ports, when given to the public, banished any doubts that may have lingered in the minds of those who had received letters from their friends at the diggings, and in the spring of 1849 the great stampede began.
Once more Sutter watched the emigrant wagons roll down the slopes of the Sierra, this time looking not like thin cascades, but avalanches of dusty snow. Already he had rented buildings to enterprising storekeepers, who were paying him a hundred dollars a month for one room; but to the few mechanics he had induced to re- turn he was paying ten dollars a day.
About twenty-five thousand of the gold-seekers crossed the Sierras that year. The government had made a con- tract with the Pacific Mail Steamship Company for a line of monthly steamers between New York and San Fran-
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CALIFORNIA
cisco by way of Panama, and thousands more took the journey by sea. There were few women in either wagon- trains or ships, and almost without exception, during that first exodus, the men were young, strong, and of good character. Many of them had recently been mustered out of the army that had reduced Mexico to terms; they were excellently disciplined and accustomed to hardships. Some were young men of good family whom necessity compelled to work, and-"good families" were not very democratic in those days-preferred to work with pick and shovel in distant California to clerking in aristocratic New York or Boston. California was truly democratic for several years, and some of these young men who were not strong enough for the hard work of the mines made a living as they could in San Francisco. One man who afterward, when fortune had smiled on him, became a brilliant member of San Francisco's young society and finally died of lockjaw as the result of being wounded in the aristocratic duel, peddled shoe-strings for several months until a family friend discovered him and set him up in business. But to return to the placers.
It is estimated that not less than seventy thousand immigrants arrived from the East during 1849 and went straight to the mines. Among them, of course, were many deserting sailors; and for months the Bay of San Francisco was crowded with craft marooned and waiting for the gold-fever to subside. Thousands more poured in from the Pacific ports; at the end of the year there were not less than a hundred thousand whites in Cali- fornia, most of them Americans. Every trade, every class, was represented, also every variety of human nature, as was soon discovered when the camps, so far
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GOLD
from the towns, became a law unto themselves, although there was little trouble during that first year. The men worked hard by day, excited, silent, minding their own business strictly; in the evenings they spun yarns of home before rolling into their blankets to be lulled to sleep by the singing of the pines, rent now and again by the long yowls of the coyote or the snorting of the grizzly bear. The gold yield of that year was twenty-three million dollars.
But those rich and apparently inexhaustible placers soon became a magnet for the type of man that flocks where gold is after some one else has taken the trouble to make it or extract it from the earth. Gamblers and sharpers of all sorts began to take passage for California, many of them remaining in San Francisco, but others going to the mines and pitching their tents. Soon every camp had its faro-table and other varieties of gambling "hells"; dance-halls and the easy-money female followed as a matter of course; there were as many bars as there were gallons of bad whisky; and the work of demoralization began. Men who were tired of work or had worked as little as possible began to make a profession of gambling or mined only to have "dust " to stake. Fights were of daily occurrence, and if one of the antagonists fell no one bothered to try the victor. Thieves and disrep- utable characters were often run out of camp by the better class of miners, or left it at the end of a rope. Few men returned from that great orgie of gold precisely the men they were when they reached those beautiful silent cañons and began the work of tearing them to pieces; although many a man's character stood the test, and he returned to civilization with a fortune in his belt,
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CALIFORNIA
no blood on his knife, and a character so hardened and toughened that he was quite equal to the task of founding the greatness of San Francisco. Others boasted to their dying day of how many times they had "killed their man"; and countless others, despite that auriferous abundance, failed to "make their pile," owing to physical weakness sometimes, but mental weakness generally; they slunk back to the towns or remained to haunt the camps, whine about their luck until they were kicked out or died of starvation, or blew out their brains "up the gulch." Darwin would have been delighted and social- ists puzzled. Even Marshall died in poverty. His saw- mill was soon overrun by the ruthless miner, and he seemed to have had little affinity for the metal he dis- covered. Either he was a poor miner or he could not get along with other men; like the rolling stone he had always been, he kept moving on, accomplishing nothing. During the seventies the legislature voted him a pension for a few years, then forgot him, and he died old and alone in a mountain cabin. A few years later California suddenly remembered him and spent several thousand dollars on a big bronze effigy, which now stands over his grave near the spot where he enriched the world and starved to death.
And Sutter? Wealth poured in on him for a time, for if he could not supply all the wants of that vast concourse of miners the men who did had to rent his land and buildings. His sawmill was destroyed, but his grist- mills went day and night, and he could command any price for his cattle and horses. Moreover, his was the fame of the discovery, and he entertained constantly at his fort men who were his intellectual equals, or visited
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GOLD
them in San Francisco. His popularity was enormous, aside from his hospitality. He was now a man of forty- six, gray, but ruddy and erect, his blue eyes always full of good will, and he delighted in playing the grand seignieur either when entertaining his equals or giving largess to the unfortunate; his manners were more natural and simple than was to be expected of a man who had ruled so long. He seldom visited the mines himself, but often laughed at the names his droll new countrymen had given them: Whisky Bay, Brandy Gulch, Poker Flat, Seven- up Ravine, Loafer's Retreat, Git-Up-and-Git, Gospel Swamp, Gouge Eye, Ground Hog's Glory, Lousy Ravine, Puke Ravine, Blue Belly Ravine, Petticoat Slide, Swelled- Head Diggings, Nary Red, Hangtown, Shirt-tail Cañon, Red Dog, Coon Hollow, Skunk Gulch, Piety Hill, Hell's Delight. Whole chapters of mining history might be evoked from these names alone. No wonder that Bret Harte was inspired !
But although Sutter entertained many gentlemen, their dress differed little from that of the humblest of their associates: a blue or red woolen shirt, pantaloons finishing inside long heavy hobnailed boots and belted in at the waist, a slouch-hat over long hair and uncut beard. In the belt were the inevitable brace of pistols and bowie- knife. The typical miner of any class was as cool as he was reckless and hot-tempered; as time went on he be- came more and more laconic and more and more profane, and the best of them drank hard and gambled, little as it might affect them. They amused themselves at the gaming-tables for want of other entertainment and lost as lightly as they won. Some hated the thought of living in a house again, governed by the laws of civilization; others "made their pile" and returned to the city or "back
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CALIFORNIA
East," satisfied with their adventure and ready for the more serious matters of life.
The gold yield of 1850 was $50,000,000; of 1853, $65,000,000. Then the placers began to show signs of decline, and men left them in hordes. Sutter had laid out the town of Sacramento, a square mile about his fort, with two streets running through the marsh down to the embarcadero. This he had sold in lots, and as he wit- nessed the troubles and disgraceful riots caused by "squatters," the lawless element that had entered the country shouting that California belonged to the American and that no Mexican grant, despite the treaty, should be valid, he may have had some premonition of his own fate. If he did not, he was soon enlightened. These needy adventurers "squatted" wherever the land pleased them, swarming not only over the rich grants of Sutter, but of the rancheros. The only hope lay in the courts, and the result was years of litigation and either a complete loss in the end or the cession of the more valuable parts to lawyers to cover their fees.
And the lawyers that left their Eastern practices to come where prices were high and pickings abundant, were, with a few notable exceptions, men of as little decency and principle as the squatters. They had no desire to break their backs at the mines, but no aversion whatever from soiling their hands. They not only charged their clients exhorbitantly and were on sale to the other side, but, being real Americans, they despised foreigners and were solicitous of squatter votes.
The details of the despoiling of the Californians is one of the ugliest chapters not only of state, but Amer- ican history; for Congress, by passing Senator Gwin's
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GOLD
bill, subtly worded but conceived entirely in the interests of the Americans in California, made de- spoliation of the original grant-holders practically cer- tain.
Sutter's grants were worth millions, but in 1870 he had not a dollar. The California legislature of that year granted him a pension of two hundred and fifty dollars a month, but discontinued it when he went to Washington to ask for justice. He died in poverty, this great land baron, monarch of all he surveyed for so many years, and lies in Littiz, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The year of his death was 1880, and he was seventy-seven years old.
IX
SAN FRANCISCO
IN April, 1806, Rezánov, anchored off the presidio of San Francisco, dreamed of a Russian navy in the bay, saw the gaunt hills and sandy amphitheater of the penin- sula set with the palaces and churches and bazars, the lofty towers with their Tartar domes, the slender crosses of his native land; the gay California sun shedding a daz- zling light on marble walls and golden roofs. In April, 1906, San Francisco, one of the ugliest cities in the world, but one of the most famous and prosperous, was de- stroyed by earthquake and fire. It has risen again, handsome, substantial, earthquake - proof and fireproof, its picturesqueness and "atmosphere" gone for ever, but on the eve of a larger population and commercial activi- ties through the Panama Canal; climbing steadily over the hills toward the south, and threatening to embrace the towns around the bay; in the course of a few years bound to become one of the greater cities of the United States, as it has, almost from its beginnings, been one of the most notable.
Between the dreams of Rezánov, dust long since in Krasnoiarsk, and the triumph of American materialism over the desire of a few for the beautiful and artistic city Nature had in mind when she planned the site, San Fran- cisco has passed through many changes intrinsic and
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