Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (2 page)

Four days after he found the yellow lump in the millrace, and five days before the United States signed the treaty with Mexico, Marshall set out on horseback through the snow for Sutter’s Fort. There he pulled Sutter aside and bade him retire to a small room and lock the door. Once they were alone, Marshall unrolled a cotton cloth and displayed the lump; he thought it was gold, but he didn’t know. All he knew was that since he had picked up that first nugget a few days earlier, he had found others like it in the millrace, and he hadn’t even been looking; they were just lying there. If this was gold, it appeared to be all over the site.

Sutter studied the lump and felt the remarkable weight of such a small piece. Then he pulled an old chemist’s reference off his shelf and discovered two more tests to try: He dripped nitric acid onto the lump, which did not mar it; then he placed it on a scale and found it to be far more dense than silver. Sutter concluded that Marshall had indeed found a nugget of gold, but rather than being joyous, he seemed concerned. On his fifty thousand acres, he grazed twelve thousand head of cattle, ten thousand head of sheep, and two thousand horses and mules and kept one thousand pigs. If the lump he now held was gold, he envisioned his ranch hands fleeing into the foothills, leaving the crops in the fields and the stock to fend for itself; he foresaw thousands of crazed miners overrunning his peaceful valley; and being a wily sort, he also realized he did not own the land on which Marshall had found the gold.

Sutter quickly negotiated a deal with the Coloma tribe: food and clothing for a three-year lease of twelve square miles surrounding the mill. With the lease in hand, he then admonished James Marshall and the mill hands to tell no one of the find. But one of the hands began
disappearing into the hills on his time off, scratching gold filings out of crevices with a jackknife, and writing to friends of his good fortune. Another bragged in a store about the gold he kept in a buckskin bag, and a wagon driver delivering supplies to the mill met a small boy who showed him a handful of gold dust. Asked by a widening circle to confirm the reports, Sutter himself finally allowed his jovial nature to overrun his guile, and he, too, began to gloat over the gold nuggets and dust found up at his new mill. By the first week of March, as he had predicted, the only field hands who remained at the fort were those physically incapable of leaving.

News of the strike leaked out of the foothills, across the plains, and down the bay to the tiny settlement of San Francisco. On March 15, 1848, the
Californian
reported “GOLD MINE FOUND.” A few weeks later, the rival
Star
called the story a sham, but that same week, the owner of the
Star
rode into San Francisco, waving a bottle filled with gold dust and booming that gold had been discovered on the American River: a bit of advertising for the new store he had built next to Sutter’s mill. In two weeks, San Francisco’s population dropped from a few hundred to about a dozen.

The United States Senate ratified the treaty with Mexico in March, and the Mexican Congress approved it in May. That summer the new United States territorial governor of California toured the gold fields along the American River and found four thousand men digging and panning, each averaging about two ounces, or thirty-two dollars a day. Miners shadowed James Marshall everywhere, squatting next to him streamside, waiting for him to exercise his divine gift. Sutter’s leasehold from the Coloma had already been overrun, and although gold was pouring into the stores at his fort, Sutter himself was out harvesting forty thousand bushels of wheat for flour, which had shot to thirty-six dollars a barrel and was expected to go to fifty.

Enclosing a tea canister of nuggets and dust with his missive, the territorial governor wrote to President James K. Polk back in Washington, “I could not bring myself to believe the reports I heard of the wealth of the gold district until I visited it myself. I have no hesitation now in saying there is more gold in the country drained by the Sacramento
and San Joaquin Rivers than will pay the cost of the war with Mexico a hundred times over.”

W
HEN THE WAR
ended, the United States government had subsidized private industry to build and operate two fleets of sidewheel steamers to connect the new Territory of California with the rest of the country. One fleet would travel between New York and Panama, the other from Panama up to Oregon with brief stops at outposts in San Diego, Monterey, and San Francisco. Captained by U.S. naval officers, the steamers were to disembark every two weeks, carrying intelligence, mail, newspapers, express freight, and eventually passengers.

The first of the Pacific Mail Fleet, the
California
departed New York Harbor on October 6, 1848, and headed around Cape Horn to set up service between Panama and Oregon. She sailed almost empty, and the captain expected his maiden voyage from Panama up to Oregon to be about the same. But while the
California
was rounding Cape Horn and heading up the Pacific, President Polk opened the Second Session of the 30th Congress on December 5, 1848. “The accounts of the abundance of gold in that territory,” Polk told Congress, “are of such an extraordinary character as would scarcely command belief were they not corroborated by authentic reports.”

The next morning, newspapers ran tall headlines. Horace Greeley, editor of the
New York Daily Tribune
, predicted that the country was “on the brink of the Age of Gold.” “Hope is drawing her thousands of disciples to the new El Dorado,” he wrote, “where fortune lies abroad upon the surface of the earth as plentiful as the mud in our streets. The only machinery necessary in the new Gold mines of California is a stout pair of arms, a shovel and a tin pan. Indeed many are fain to put up with a shingle or a bit of board, and dig away quietly in peace of mind, pocketing their fifty or sixty dollars a day and having plenty of leisure.”

Every newspaper in the East ran articles about the ease of finding gold in California. How-to books, like the
Emigrant’s Guide to the Gold Mines
, described vast riverbeds “paved with gold to the thickness of a hand,” and claimed that “twenty to fifty thousand dollars of gold” could be “picked out almost instantly.” Lectures on gold mining drew enormous
crowds, and the lecturers added their own hyperbole: that miners in California were finding up to four pounds of gold, or a thousand dollars a day, that one man had found thirty-six pounds in one day, that not even a hundred thousand men could exhaust all of the gold in California if they worked hard at it for ten years.

“In a moment, as it were,” wrote the editor of the
Hartford Daily Courant
, “a desert country that never deserved much notice from the world has become the centre of universal attraction. Fifteen millions have already come into the possession of
somebody
and all creation is going out there to fill their pockets.”

But all creation had only two ways to get to the new territory: They could walk or they could sail. Those choosing to walk would have to wait until April, for between them and California stood the Rocky Mountains, and winter in those mountains first killed the grass, then buried it under feet of snow. Without feed, the pack animals would die.

The impatient ones sailed, but now they had to decide: around Cape Horn or across Panama. The route via Cape Horn was a four- to eight-month journey of thirteen thousand nautical miles that promised the most terrifying storms a landlubber could conjure. In 1833, Charles Darwin described the Horn in his diary: “The sight,” he wrote, “is enough to make a landsman dream for a week about death, peril, and shipwreck.” Waves eighty to ninety feet tall, the Horn’s infamous “greybeards,” swept across the ocean at thirty knots and battered ships already encrusted in ice. Spars snapped, sails shredded, and men washed overboard to freeze and drown in an icy sea.

The route across Panama far exceeded the other two for speed and convenience, and the ways to die were less dramatic. The first leg, New York to Panama, took but nine days with a short layover in Havana. Once the passengers arrived, the journey across the isthmus was more vexing than life threatening. Ahead of them were five days in a dugout canoe, on the back of an unpredictable mule, and atop their own sore feet. The trip exposed them to tropical heat, outbreaks of cholera, malaria, and yellow fever, and coffee sweetened by natives chewing sugar cane and spitting into the cup. Then they arrived in the three-hundred-year-old city of Panama, which one American described as a “dirty, noisy, and unpleasant place to stay in.” The sun was too hot, the water
too noxious to drink, and the native lemonade too “sloppy” to swallow. Here they waited on the docks until a vessel could ferry them up the west coast to San Francisco.

When the
California
steamed into the Bay of Panama for a brief layover and to take on more coal, her captain looked out upon the docks and saw mountains of old trunks, dirty bedding, rucksacks, ropes, tents, pots, pans, utensils, spades, and pickaxes. The stories of gold in the far reaches of the Union had incited riots at the steamship offices back east. Already, the first Atlantic steamer had arrived on the Caribbean side of Panama filled with passengers. Two days later a bark arrived carrying another sixty. By the middle of January, five other ships had offloaded more passengers to begin the trek upriver and over the mountains to Panama City.

The
California
had room for 200 passengers, but over 500 waited at the docks. The captain ordered lumber, built berths in the ship’s open spaces, and left Panama two weeks later with 365 passengers and 36 crew “crammed into the ship and overflowing onto the deck and the housetops.” But by then, a total of four steamers, two barks, three brigs, and a schooner had deposited 726 passengers on the opposite shore to make their way to the Pacific side, and more were coming in daily on vessels embarking from New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Orleans.

When the
California
steamed through the Golden Gate carrying the very first forty-niners, a reporter for the
Alta California
described the scene: “The California is a truly magnificent vessel, and her fine appearance as she came in sight off the town called forth cheer upon cheer from our enraptured citizens. … She passed the vessels of war in the harbor under a salute from each, returned by hearty cheering from the crowded decks, and at eleven was safely moored at the anchorage off the town.”

Within the hour, officers and seamen alike began abandoning the ship, and before the week was out the entire thirty-six-man crew had dwindled to the captain and one boy from the engine room. The lure of the mountains was irresistible. Miners found gold under the doorstep to their cabin, beneath an uprooted stump cleared to make a road, when they pulled the stake to which they had tethered their mule the night before. Wrote one contemporary, “A sailor will be up at the mines for two months, work on his own account, and come down with two or three thousand
dollars.” To earn that kind of money aboard ship, a sailor would have to holystone decks and eat fried duff for nearly twenty-one years.

Soon, dozens of schooners, brigs, and barquentines scheduled for only temporary stops at San Francisco floated empty in the bay, and eventually over five hundred ships lay at anchor, rotting in the harbor, some with their cargoes still on board.

The navy tried to stop the desertion from its own ranks with a public display of punishment: With the crews of several naval vessels watching off Sausalito, one captain dealt one hundred lashes to three deserters, then ceremoniously hanged two others from the yardarm. But even that did little to stop the frenzied flow into the mountains. The commander of the Pacific squadron finally wrote to the secretary of the navy: “For the present, and I fear for years to come, it will be impossible for the United States to maintain any naval establishment in California.”

The army fared no better. A private’s pay in 1848 was six dollars a month, which, by that summer in the Sierra Nevada, would buy about three pounds of flour. One soldier clarified the moral dilemma in a sentence: “The struggle between
right
and six dollars a month, and
wrong
and $75 a day is rather a severe one.” The army in northern California shrank from almost thirteen hundred to fewer than six hundred, and sending half the army off to bring in the deserted other half was risky. Sometimes entire platoons, including officers and soldiers with their horses and weapons, saddled up and rode away into the mountains.

Within a year, tens of thousands of miners had examined nearly every rock within six feet of the surface of an area from Grizzly Flats in south El Dorado County to Emigrant Gap in north Placer County, the foothill region northeast of Sacramento drained by the three forks of the American River. Gold fever along the American ran like a forest fire out of control, bursting up one side of a ridge and down the other, spreading over regions north and south, until waves of prospectors had scoured California’s entire interior of foothills and flatland bounded by the Sierra Nevada to the east and the Coast Ranges to the west, stretching from Redding at the head of the Sacramento Valley halfway down the San Joaquin Valley three hundred miles to the south.

In 1848, the settlement of San Francisco had a population of 459; Sacramento was one store and a warehouse; and all of the Chinese known to
be living in California numbered 7. At the end of 1849, San Francisco had exploded to nearly 25,000; Sacramento was a city of 12,000; and by the early 1850s, 20,000 more Chinese had arrived. In 1849 alone 85,000 men and women flocked to northern California, 23,000 from countries other than the United States.

Within two years, San Francisco had become a major seaport, the city filled with three-story brick buildings and thousands of masts lining the waterfront. A year later, dirt roads crisscrossed Telegraph Hill, and a solid line of houses ran halfway up. A lot facing Portsmouth Square sold for $16.50 in 1847, went for $6,000 the following year, and brought $45,000 six months later. The cost of lumber shot up twenty-five times, and still there were shortages. Labor wages escalated from a dollar a day, to ten dollars, to twenty dollars, and then to thirty dollars.