Chapter 4
In January, 1848, a carpenter named James Marshall, originally from New Jersey, was building a millrace for his partner, John Sutter, in California’s Coloma Valley when a gleaming pebble approximately half the size of a pea caught his eye. He stooped to pick it up. It was gold. By the fall of that year, gold was being sought and found in California from Tuolumne in the south to the Trinity River in the north — a distance of four hundred miles.
By 1849, word of the discovery of gold in California had spread across the United States and around the world, and the rush was on. In just that first year of the gold rush, more than ninety thousand people heard the news, imagined themselves wealthy, and abandoned their homes and former lives with scarcely a second thought or a backward glance.
And that was just the Americans. Additional thousands poured in from Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, Europe and even Australia.
Most of the gold seekers were the young, adventurous and desperate; an estimated 98% of them were male. A cottage industry of publishing guidebooks on how a traveler might find his way west sprang up. One such publication indicated an overland route from New Orleans to the Sierra that could be traversed in only thirty-six days — when the actual travel time was
two hundred and sixteen days.
Another suggested a southern route through Mexico that crossed “thickly settled country.” Instead, it passed through a killing desert and the territory of hostile Apaches. Of the almost ninety thousand who headed west in 1849, only forty thousand made it to the gold fields. Of those who did make it, 99% didn’t find enough gold to cover their expenses. All the best claims had been staked in 1848.
Still, the gold rush, far more than earlier agrarian migrations, was largely responsible for the development of the American West. It was the primary reason for the founding of the city of Denver. It was responsible for the direct admission of California to the Union in 1850, having been ceded to the United States by Mexico in 1848, just after the Sutter’s Mill find, but before the word got out. Congress didn’t bother with the usual requirement of California becoming a recognized territory first.
Besides finding gold, the other impetus to head west was the opportunity to “mine the miners.” At a time when the prevailing wage for a laborer was a dollar a day, jobs digging gold on someone else’s claim were being offered at a pay scale of ten to fifteen dollars per day. Simple labor had become a way to strike it at least moderately rich.
A not dissimilar thought occurred to a young man in Chicago when in early 1849 he first heard the news of gold being found. Michael Walsh was, fittingly enough, a journeyman brewer. At the time, Walsh was chafing under the stern direction of his mentor and father-in-law, master brewer Hans Koenig. True, Hans had taught him the marvelous craft of making beer. And Hans had allowed the young man to marry his only daughter, the tall and comely Adeline. And the old
braumeister
had even built a home for his daughter and son-in-law when the first of their three children had been born.
But Michael Walsh and Hans Koenig could not agree on their beer.
Herr Koenig insisted that beer be brewed only one way — the way he had learned. The way German law had decreed beer should be brewed since medieval times. Michael Walsh had no objection to brewing his father-in-law’s way. It made a grand beer, right enough. But he, too, came from a country with a proud tradition of brewing and distilling, and anytime Michael tried to brew some fine dark stout, even in his own house, Hans would fly into a rage about “Irish swill,” throw all of Michael’s wonderful elixir into the street, and threaten to take back his daughter, his grandchildren and the house in which Michael lived.
All of which led Michael Walsh, at age thirty-one, to sell the house his father-in-law had fortuitously put in his name, buy two wagons, four oxen, brewing equipment and all the supplies Adeline insisted upon, bid the bitter Hans farewell and set off for California with his family to brew Irish stout for all those miners, many of them his countrymen, making ten to fifteen dollars a day.
He was sure they were thirsty. He was sure his fortune would soon be made.
The early part of the Walsh’s journey was relatively easy. They drove their wagons, in caravan with those of four other families leaving Chicago, across the blessedly flat and relatively settled prairies of Illinois to St. Louis. From there, they enjoyed the comparative comfort of a steamboat ride to Independence, Missouri.
But once in Independence, the place where large parties of migrants formed for the westward push across the vast wilderness, life became a great deal more precarious. The plague of cholera struck. The disease was debilitating at the very least, producing bouts of diarrhea, projectile vomiting of blood and, most commonly, death.
Michael and Adeline were fearful for their family: nearly panicked on the one hand that they would die and leave their children orphans, stranded hundreds of miles from their Chicago home; filled with dread on the other hand that their children would die, leaving them with broken hearts.
To ward off the possibility of disease, the Walshes hit on two strategies. Adeline made sure that each of them was meticulously clean, right down to scraping the dirt from under their fingernails. She’d noticed, growing up, that those people most susceptible to disease and death were invariably the ones who went the longest between baths. Michael’s contribution was to soak bandannas in a barrel of his stout that he’d brought along, and then cover the faces of his family with them.
The Walshes’ masked countenances soon drew public notice, as did the fact that they remained healthy. Others emulated them, though not many chose to bathe, and Michael even allowed them to dip their bandannas — once they’d been well laundered, at Adeline’s insistence — into his barrel of stout. In short order, a party was formed to head west on the Overland Trail, and escape the pestilence of the staging area. The Walshes were among them. Many in the party came by the Walshes’ wagons to dip their face masks in the stout again, until they were sure that the danger of contracting cholera was well past.
Not a single migrant in the Masked Man Party, as it came to be called, came down with the dread disease.
Neither did a single migrant come to consider Michael Walsh’s stout anything but medicine. It worked just fine for that, thank God. But drink it for pleasure? A substitute for real beer?
“Mister, don’t make me laugh,” one and all told Michael Walsh.
The gold seekers pushed on through present day Nebraska. Even though the greatest hardships lay ahead, the long journey was beginning to take its toll on the Walsh children, the oldest of whom, Wilhelmine, was only six. Rory and Erik were four and three, respectively.
Adeline did not want to see her children die of exhaustion or depletion of their spirits, not after she’d kept them safe from the cholera. At every trading post along the way, she asked her husband if they might not establish their home there, if he might not make a success of his business there. After all, so many others had set up their businesses and were prospering from selling to the flood of immigrants.
But Michael Walsh was determined to make it to California. He said that’s where the greatest concentration of riches lay, and that’s where they would go. Unspoken, even to his wife, was his fear that if he didn’t find a large gathering of fellow Irishmen with gold in their pockets, he’d never be able to sell the stout he wanted to brew.
So, they pushed on through the treacherous mountain passes of the Rockies and the great, deadly deserts of the West. In Nevada, the sun was so fierce they had to travel at night by torchlight. One morning as the migrant party stopped to rest in the shade of an outcropping of rock, Michael Walsh found his three children with his wife’s fingers in their mouths. Their parched little mouths were red. They were suckling on Adeline’s blood.
It was moisture, she said. She’d pricked her fingers and was giving her children their mother’s strength.
Others in the wagon train sought a less drastic way to slake their thirst and preserve their meager stores of water. They finally came to Michael Walsh for small measures of his stout. But even dying of thirst, they developed no taste for the stuff. This filled Walsh with a dread almost as great as the thought of death.
Finally, eighteen grueling weeks after leaving Independence, Missouri, the Masked Man Party reached the Sierra Nevada, only to find inclines so steep that their wagons had to be broken down and hauled over jagged ridges. But now, even this backbreaking work could not dampen the enthusiasm of the gold seekers. They knew they were near their destination. Just the other side of these mountains was the green, fertile Sacramento Valley where gold lay waiting to be found. They would dig their fortunes — their dreams — right out of the earth.
The Walshes never made it that far.
They were stopped by the epiphany Adeline Walsh experienced when the sparkling majesty of the lake that would later bear her name first filled her eyes. She drew a deep breath, clasped her hands to her heart, and turned to her husband. The words she spoke to him that day were later recorded for posterity.
“Michael, we have found Eden on high.” Her next words were less poetic but had far more immediate impact. “This is where we will stay.”
Assuming his wife meant where they would rest, fill their barrels with the crystalline water from the lake, and gather their energies for the final push, Michael did not argue. But by the very next morning he understood clearly that if he were to continue the journey, he would do so alone. On foot.
Adeline felt certain that it was her destiny to live out her days in this place. Michael argued that it was already September, and that if they didn’t leave soon, they would be snowbound and no doubt die there. Adeline’s response was that she better start felling some trees then, build a cabin and lay in some food.
Michael Walsh was galled to have come so far and be stopped just short of his goal. But try as he might — and try he did — he couldn’t imagine going on and leaving his wife and children behind. He was sure he’d be consigning them to their deaths, and even if they were to survive somehow, he’d miss them sorely. Taking pity on her husband without losing a bit of her resolve, Adeline comforted Michael. Then she cajoled him into making a further concession, even more vexing than the last. She talked him into brewing beer her father’s way.
Adeline was sure that once word spread about the lake, anyone traveling through these mountains would stop there to replenish their water supplies. Doubtless, many of those who did would like something stronger to drink. She was sure that Michael could brew and sell the beer her father had taught him to make.
With great gentleness, she reminded him that her father’s beer was a very good brew.
“And everyone thinks mine is snake oil,” Michael Walsh said bitterly.
Hurt to his soul, but still wanting to make his fortune, he reluctantly agreed.
When the remainder of the Masked Man Party was told of the Walshes’s decision, they viewed it with suspicion. To a man, they were sure that Michael Walsh had somehow stumbled on to gold. The Miner’s Commandment said:
Thou shall not tell any false tales of good diggings.
Meaning don’t send your fellow gold-seeker off on a wild goose chase to your own advantage, lest you taste his vengeance.
But Michael Walsh hadn’t done that.
Rather, he’d said he was staying because his wife wanted him to stay. With one exception, the other twenty-three gold seekers of the Masked Man Party were bachelors — but even the married man couldn’t imagine having come so far, enduring so many hardships, and then stopping just short of your goal solely for the sake of a woman.
In the early days of the gold rush, one of the most alluring tales pulling migrants westward was that of Goldstrike Lake. Legend had it that a prospector had found a beautiful mountain lake where gold was strewn on the shores just waiting to be picked up. Unfortunately, the prospector had died, been killed, some said, before he could file his claim and reveal the lake’s whereabouts.
The common suspicion in the Masked Man Party was that Michael Walsh had found those legendary golden shores. So in the name of gratitude for the aid the Walshes had given in the face of the cholera outbreak, the party delayed its departure to help the family fell trees and erect a rough log cabin. Of course, they really stayed to make a collective effort to find the gold that tight-mouthed, want-it-all-for-himself, papist bastard Walsh had blundered upon.
The problem was, the lakeshore was twelve miles long. And with all of the shoreline’s inlets and points, there had to be twenty-five miles of ground to explore. More daunting than that, some parts of the shoreline could be reached only by descending sheer cliffs. That or paddling in by canoe. Many a gold seeker in the Masked Man Party tried to worm the secret out of Michael Walsh, but the brewer never let on. Not a word. Just pretended like he didn’t know what the hell any of them was hinting at.
The cunning Mick.
Several men took to following Michael Walsh around when he wasn’t busy working on his cabin. They watched him fish and hunt. But they couldn’t catch him out. He didn’t drop the smallest clue as to where he’d made his strike. When he wasn’t engaged in providing for his family, he spent most of his free time filling his bucket in the little springs that fed the lake, and then he toted the water home.