The Age of Gold (68 page)

Much of American politics of the nineteenth century turned on the struggle between debtors and creditors for control of the currency. Creditors acclaimed gold as the only honest money, as the currency God Himself had ordained by making it rare and therefore beyond the manipulation of mere mortals, including that subspecies of mortals so tempted to corruption: politicians. Debtors decried gold as the money of the rich and the chains of the poor. Money was made for the people, they said, and not the people for money. God was no banker, and even if He was, He had also created silver and paper to supplement gold when His children required them.

Whichever side God was on, before 1848 gold was simply too scarce in America to serve as the sole currency. Silver circulated under federal law (as did gold); paper notes were issued by state governments and privately owned banks. The result was a financial hodgepodge, with gold and silver being favored or shunned depending on their comparative availability, and paper being discounted for the distance and unreliability of the issuer.

James Marshall’s strike in California, however, marked the beginning of the ascendancy of gold. The boom in the world gold supply eased demands for resort to silver and paper. The Civil War interrupted the trend, as the Union government felt compelled to issue paper currency to cover the cost of the conflict, but within a few years of the end of the war, gold reasserted its centrality. (It was during the period of readjustment that Gould and Fisk launched their raid on the country’s gold supply.) The Coinage Act of 1873 neglected to mention silver at all, essentially placing the United States on a gold standard.

But in certain respects, gold did its work too well. Trade and industry expanded during the Civil War and for the next three decades. Production in all sectors increased, outstripping the growth in the (gold) money supply and thereby pushing prices down. Again debtors clamored for relief.
Better organized than before—first in the Farmers’ Alliance, then in the Populist party, and finally in the Democratic party—they called for the remonetization of silver. Their rhetoric was often overheated and under- cooked. The Coinage Act was dubbed the “Crime of’73.” The advocates of gold were said to be the minions of a sinister conspiracy that aimed to rule the world from headquarters in London, a conspiracy controlled by a cabal of Jewish bankers linked to the Rothschilds. William Jennings Bryan climbed to somewhat higher but no less impassioned ground at the Democratic convention of 1896, when he declared defiance to gold and all who served it:

Bryan won the Democratic presidential nomination with this speech, but he subsequently lost the country. His inclusive phrases were too generous: most of the commercial and laboring interests of America sided with gold against silver. And why not? Despite a recent depression, the material standard of living of the average American had risen a great deal during the decades the country had been on gold. One didn’t have to be a banker to appreciate this, or to desire that the favorable trend continue.

Although Bryan lost to William McKinley, the candidate of gold, in 1896, he didn’t discourage easily. He ran again in 1900. By that year, however, his opposition to gold wasn’t simply a minority viewpoint but an anachronism. The depression was over and the country was riding another wave of expansion, this one driven by the new discoveries of gold in South Africa and the Yukon, and by new methods of refining gold (which employed
cyanide, rather than mercury, to wrest the gold from the surrounding quartz). This latest addition to the gold stream increased the money supply even without silver, setting the United States more firmly on the gold standard than ever. The Gold Standard Act of 1900 made things official.

Jessie Frémont lived long enough to see Republican McKinley elected a half century after her husband John had been the Republican party’s first presidential nominee. She doubtless took some satisfaction in the event, although the memory of that earlier contest was bittersweet, for, as things happened, John’s nomination for the presidency in 1856 proved to be the high point of his public career, and in certain respects the high point of both of their lives. Several months after the election they encountered serious trouble on the Mariposa, where, among the frustrated placermen forced to take employment in Frémont’s quartz mines, there developed great resentment that one man—even one as famous as John C. Frémont—should monopolize so much of the gold. He didn’t dig the gold; he hadn’t even discovered it. By right and justice, gold ought to belong to those who brought it out of the earth. Some of the grumblers, emulating Jean-Nicolas Perlot and the other early squatters, began digging on their own behalf on the Mariposa, and defied Frémont to prevent them from keeping what they dug. Others took matters more firmly into their hands, invading one of Frémont’s shafts and provoking an armed standoff that threatened to erupt into pitched battle. Although Frémont and the occupiers eventually reached a bloodless settlement, the affair tarnished his reputation among many who had been his staunchest supporters.

The outbreak of the Civil War caught Frémont in France raising money to expand operations on the Mariposa; immediately he turned to purchasing weapons to defeat the Confederates, writing checks for the guns from his own account. Lincoln considered him for minister to Paris, where he retained his popular cachet, but he preferred to return to arms. He received command of the Union army’s Department of the West, headquartered near Jessie’s family home in St. Louis. His zeal for the antislavery cause—or perhaps it was her zeal, operating through him—outran his authority, and when he issued a proclamation freeing the slaves of Missouri, Lincoln countermanded the order. Frémont rashly allowed himself to be nominated for president in 1864 by Republican radicals vexed with Lincoln; when his candidacy stalled, his star plunged further.

Frémont had never been an astute businessman, and amid the distractions of the Civil War he lost financial control of the Mariposa, which continued to pay, only no longer to him. He tried to recoup his fortune by going into railroads, but found himself competing against Leland Stanford and others who actually knew the business. The money that remained from the Mariposa vanished when his rail venture collapsed in 1870.

All that saved him and Jessie from dire poverty was her pen. As she had come to his literary rescue in the 1840s by drafting his expeditionary reports, now she came to his—and her—financial rescue by contributing dozens of articles to magazines about their lives together and apart. At times the two were compelled to accept the charity of friends. When bronchitis forced Frémont to find a warm climate, Collis Huntington offered his own private car for the trip. Frémont at first resisted the offer, but allowed himself to be persuaded by Huntington’s logic: “You forget our road goes over your buried campfires and climbs many a grade you jogged over on a mule. I think we rather owe you this.”

Although Congress finally voted Frémont a pension, he didn’t live to enjoy it. Seized by a chill while visiting Brooklyn in 1890, during his seventy-eighth year, he weakened quickly. Yet to the end he hoped for a another stroke of good fortune. “If I keep this free of pain,” he told his doctor, during a momentary improvement, “I can go home next week.”

“Home?” replied the doctor, who was unfamiliar with the full Frémont biography. “What do you call home?”

“Why, California, of course.”

Jessie added, in her account of the moment, “And with the name which had been so long his guiding star, he spoke no more.”

John’s star was Jessie’s also. After his death she settled in Los Angeles, the town that had been eclipsed by San Francisco during the Gold Rush but was now coming into its own as the center of activity in southern California. Although she couldn’t afford to buy a house, admirers built her a comfortable home of redwood, situated in a grove of orange trees a few miles from the old pueblo. Lily, long since a grown woman, tended to her mother till Jessie died in 1902.

T
HERE IS NO EVIDENCE
that Jessie Frémont ever met Sarah Royce, whose courage and fortitude en route to the goldfields matched her own— the one traveling across the isthmus, the other over the plains and desert. But in Jessie’s later years, she did meet Sarah’s son, Josiah Royce.

After Weaverville and San Francisco, Sarah and the elder Josiah sampled several locations along the Sierra front and in the Sacramento Valley before settling at Grass Valley, north of Coloma. There Sarah got the house she had been yearning for, and a community more composed than any she had experienced since Iowa. “There were three churches, all very well attended, and each sustaining a Sunday school,” she wrote. “There was also a good-sized public school, as well as one or two social and beneficent societies.” She and Josiah had two more daughters, a son who died in infancy, and then a second son, named for his father.

The family remained in the gold country till Josiah was ten, when, to improve his educational opportunities—he already was showing signs of brilliance at books—they moved to San Francisco, where he was enrolled in a school recently named for Abraham Lincoln. Though the city’s Vigilance Committee had disbanded years before, some of its spirit persisted on the playground. “My comrades very generally found me disagreeably striking
in my appearance, by reason of the fact that I was redheaded, freckled, countrified, quaint, and unable to play boys’ games,” Josiah recalled. “The boys in question gave me my first introduction to the ‘majesty of the community.’ ” He survived to attend high school, and then to cross the bay to Oakland, where the state university specified by the constitution of 1849 had only recently opened (rather than at Vallejo, as Mariano Vallejo had hoped. The university moved to Berkeley midway through Royce’s undergraduate years). Royce impressed the president of the university, who, after relocating east, invited Royce to join him at the newly established Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. There Royce earned a doctorate in philosophy in 1878. Except for a short stint back at Berkeley, he spent the rest of his professional life in the east, mostly at Harvard.

Yet he never forgot his California roots, and when a Boston publisher invited him to write a book about the early days of California, he happily accepted. Research for the book led him to Jessie and John Frémont, whose published version of John’s role in the conquest of California struck Royce as entirely too heroic. Royce thought the Mexicans had justice on their side in resisting Frémont, whom Royce castigated as the perpetrator of “purely aggressive” actions against a legitimate government. (To a friend Royce later explained that he might have entitled the pertinent book chapter “Frémont’s League with the Devil.”) Yet though Royce had nothing good to say about the fiercely protective Jessie, he found John oddly appealing, not least in his convenient lapses of memory. The old soldier displayed, as Royce described it, a “charming and courteous mendacity.”

Royce’s book was a history of California to 1856; it was also a study of the American character as it evolved under the peculiar conditions of the Gold Rush. Before the Forty-Niners went west, Royce explained, they fairly well represented the national character as it then existed. But amid the pressures of the hunt for wealth, certain traits emerged more clearly in California than elsewhere.

Californians’ mistakes were undeniable. “We exhibited a novel degree of carelessness and overhastiness, an extravagant trust in luck, a previously unknown blindness to our social duties, and an indifference to the rights of foreigners.” But Californians also showed some of the best American traits, and in doing so set an honorable path for the future. “As a body, our pioneer community in California was persistently cheerful, energetic, courageous, and teachable. In a few years it had repented of its graver faults, it had endured with charming good humor their severest penalties, and it was ready to begin with fresh devotion the work whose true importance it had now at length learned: the work of building a well-organized, permanent, and progressive State on the Pacific Coast.”

T
HAT SARAH ROYCE
remained in California after the Gold Rush, making her permanent home there, was no great surprise. That Yee Ah Tye did the same was rather more remarkable. Like most of the argonauts, but especially the Chinese, for whom tending ancestral shrines was a filial duty, Yee aimed to return to his native land once he made his fortune in the goldfields. Yet notwithstanding the rampant prejudice against the Chinese—formalized by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned the immigration of Chinese laborers—Yee chose to stay in California. Perhaps it was the personal freedom of America that appealed to him; perhaps he simply liked the idea of being able to make more money than he could ever imagine making in China. He took what he earned as an association leader in San Francisco and invested in commercial and mining operations on the Feather River. At one point he employed as many as a hundred men. By the time of his 1896 death he was honored among Asian- and Euro-Americans alike. The
Plumas National-Bulletin
, in reporting his passing, described him as “of unusual intelligence and business capacity, and a
courteous gentleman.” His family (“all of the children being good English scholars, and the girls accomplished musicians”) had “many friends among the Americans who will feel sorry to learn of their bereavement.” Just before his death, Yee made his strongest statement of attachment to his adopted country, insisting that his bones not be returned to China, as was customary among his countrymen, but remain in America.