Authors: H.W. Brands
O
THER ARGONAUTS DID
get home. Vicente Pérez Rosales returned to Chile, where he entered the service of the Chilean government. In recognition of his California experience, he was sent to Europe to promote immigration to the New World—to Chile, naturally, rather than California. Subsequently he became a provincial administrator in Concepción, and then a Chilean senator.
Tom Archer and Edward Hargraves returned to Australia, the former to resume his previous obscurity, the latter to become a national hero (but not a knight).
Jean-Nicolas Perlot made it back to Paris and then Belgium, albeit by a circuitous route. Perlot left California in 1857 for the headwaters of the Columbia River, where gold had been discovered. But he ran out of money in Portland, and opened a vegetable gardening business there. Eventually the call of home drew him east across the United States and the Atlantic. He married a girl from his ancestral town of Herbeumont. He returned with her to Portland, but she missed Belgium and convinced him that the old country was where they belonged. They bought a house in Arlon and raised four children, and vegetables. “I have remained a gardener,” Perlot wrote shortly before his death, at the age of seventy-seven. “Only I myself consume the vegetables I grow.”
William Swain survived the fevers of Chagres and rejoined Sabrina and Eliza in upstate New York. With the five hundred dollars he brought back from California, he purchased some land and developed an orchard with brother George; before long they were the leading peach growers in Niagara County.
Lewis Manly returned to Wisconsin—only to realize he’d seen too
much of the elephant to resume his unexciting former life. He packed up and went west again, this time giving Death Valley a wide berth. He eventually bought a ranch in the Santa Clara Valley, near San Jose.
N
OT TILL
1877 did William Sherman make the trip he promised Grenville Dodge: to the Pacific by train. As commanding general of the army, Sherman had his hands full with official duties. He directed continuing efforts to suppress Indian resistance on the plains, employing at times the harsh tactics he warned the Sioux against at Fort Laramie. He stopped short, however, of enlisting civilian volunteers in the wake of Custer’s defeat at the Little Bighorn, as many public officials advocated; doubtless his experience with volunteer law enforcement in San Francisco influenced his decision. (In 1881, following the assassination of President James Garfield by Charles Guiteau, Sherman stationed troops around Guiteau’s jail cell to forestall any vigilante action.) During this same period he authorized retaliation against the Modoc tribe of northern California after their leader—called Captain Jack by whites—killed General Edward Canby, the head of a truce commission and a comrade of Sherman’s from the days at Monterey in the Mexican War. (The defeat of Captain Jack essentially marked the end of Indian resistance in California.)
In 1875, amid the serial scandals that engulfed the presidency of Ulysses Grant, Sherman published his memoirs of the Civil War (and of his time in California before the war). As Grant’s stock slipped, Sherman’s rose, and he became, in the eyes of many Americans of the North and West, the country’s model military hero. That southerners greeted his memoirs with renewed bitterness seemed to leaders of the Republican party all the more cause to sponsor Sherman for the presidency. In 1876, in 1880, and again in 1884, concerted draft-Sherman movements developed; only when he responded to the best-organized of the campaigns, in 1884, with what became the definitive statement of denial—“I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected”—did the appeals die down.
For the rest of his life he remained a celebrity and a speaker much in demand. Chauncey Depew, no mean toastmaster himself, called Sherman
“the readiest and most original talker in the United States.” In Columbus, Ohio, Sherman added another epigram to the American lexicon when he told the younger generation not to get the wrong idea about war. “There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory,” he said. “But boys, it is all hell.”
Having complained during the 1850s at the agitation over slavery, Sherman in the 1880s became an advocate for African-American equality. He recommended against the segregation of black troops within the army, and urged that if the southern states continued to deny the franchise to blacks, they lose seats in Congress or, in the extreme case, face another northern invasion.
With the encouragement of Sam Clemens, he published a revised edition of his memoirs in 1885. He wrote various magazine articles, including one entitled “Old Times in California.” He died in New York City in 1891.
R
OBERT WATERMAN AND
James Douglass were tried in San Francisco for murder and lesser crimes in their brutal treatment of the crew of the
Challenge
on its failed run for the record around Cape Horn. The jury deadlocked over Captain Waterman on the murder charge, convicting him instead of cruel treatment and fining him $400. First Mate Douglass was convicted of murder (in the death of the Italian, Pawpaw) and of assault, but was merely fined $250, the jury evidently accepting Waterman’s defiant word—in which Douglass gladly concurred—that the mate was simply following orders.
J
OHN SUTTER’S BAD LUCK
lasted the rest of his life. Acting on the philosophy he developed by hard experience during the Gold Rush years—“Gold digging is a lottery,” he said; “among hundreds, maybe one or two get rich from it. Most people prefer a safe investment; farming is the best of all”—he retired to his farm on the Feather River. He regaled visitors with stories of California before the Gold Rush and sat for portraits by itinerant painters, but drank away what little money he still had. In 1864
the California legislature, embarrassed at the poverty of the man who was widely called the father of California, voted him $15,000, payable over five years at $250 per month. He said he disdained charity but would accept the payment as restitution for the injuries done him.
In 1865 he reprised his earlier role as patron of the tired and hungry, and took in a drifter, who proceeded to rob him. When, reprising his role as law-giver, he had the man apprehended and whipped, the miscreant responded by burning down Sutter’s farmhouse. With no place to live, Sutter sailed for the American East, where he hoped to secure compensation from Congress for what he had lost. Various influential people endorsed his petition; William Sherman wrote, “Your hospitality was proverbial. It was the common belief that if not for your fort, and your herds of cattle, sheep, etc., the immigrants arriving in California during the years 1847, 8 and 9 would have suffered for food. It was owing to your efforts to develop the country, more especially in your building the grist mill and the sawmill at Coloma, that the world was indebted for the discovery of the gold mines.” After years of dithering, the relevant House committee in 1880 reported favorably on a Sutter relief bill; a joint resolution was introduced in the Senate to grant the old impresario $50,000. The measure got caught in the politics of that election year, yet its sponsors assured Sutter that it would pass first thing the next session.
Sutter died of undetermined but presumably natural causes, before Congress met again.
A
MID HIS OWN
ill fortune, Sutter could take a certain pleasure from the downfall of the man responsible for much of his grief. Till the end of the 1850s, Sam Brannan maintained his Midas touch. His business operations in Sacramento and San Francisco paid handsomely, allowing him to diversify still further. He bought land in southern California, near Los Angeles, and in Hawaii, at Honolulu. He traded across the Pacific to China, and across the Atlantic to Europe. He imported prime livestock and the best varieties of wine grapes.
He also invested heavily in the Napa Valley, north of San Francisco.
But the valley, which Brannan hoped to develop as a watering spot for the well-to-do, proved deeper than it looked, at least with regard to Brannan’s money. Tens of thousands of dollars went in, and very little came out. As one common version of the story explained, the only thing Brannan got from his investment in Napa was the liquor from a distillery there—and he got far too much of that. He began to exhibit the same weakness for drink that afflicted Sutter; this clouded his judgment and limited his ability to deal with such new challenges as the Civil War. Unlike Asbury Harpending and his secessionist friends, Brannan was an outspoken Unionist, although he sometimes spoke too soon, as when he threw a party to celebrate the capture of Charleston—
before
the city fell to Federal forces.
Brannan’s wife divorced him and took their children; his payments to her drained him badly. Fair-weather friends fled to others who had better cash flow. He traveled to Mexico to redeem some old bonds and was compensated in land, which he hoped would allow him to turn his affairs around. But the Indians occupying the land had other notions and ran him off. He married again, to a Mexican woman, who cared for him at Escondido, north of San Diego, as his alcoholism deepened and depression set in.
He died at Escondido in 1889. His widow lacked the money to bury him, so the body lay unclaimed in a vault for more than a year. Finally a nephew appeared and arranged an interment.
M
ARIANO VALLEJO SPENT
the last years of his life in poverty of a more genteel sort, on a remnant of his once-vast empire, a small parcel at Sonoma called Lachryma Montis. The name referred to an artesian spring that flowed like tears from a hillside, but it might also have summarized Vallejo’s feelings on retreating there.
Yet Vallejo wasn’t one to dwell on his losses. Though accustomed to being the bestower of gifts rather than the recipient, he and his wife lived off the generosity of their son-in-law, John Frisbie, until the mid-1870s, when Frisbie lost heavily in a Nevada bubble. The younger man fled his creditors for Mexico, where he ingratiated himself to President Porfirio Díaz by arranging a reduction of American tariffs on Mexican imports.
Díaz rewarded Frisbie with, among other items, a gold mine. Before long he was far richer than he had ever been in the United States, and he resumed support of his parents-in-law.
At times Vallejo waxed nostalgic for the days before the Americans. “If the Californians could all gather together to breathe a lament,” he wrote, “it would reach Heaven as a moving sigh which would cause fear and consternation to the Universe. What misery!… This country was the true Eden, the land of promise where hunger was never known.”
More often, however, he was willing to forgive and forget. To stretch the household budget, he taught himself to do his own maintenance and repair work. He learned to operate the machinery of the Sonoma waterworks. He engaged, in a minor way, in various civic and political activities, accepting appointment to the state horticultural board and addressing audiences on holidays. He wrote his memoirs and gathered the papers and recollections of other native Californians. And he reaffirmed the faith that had been sorely tested during the dark days—for him—of the Gold Rush. “Believe me, Ricardo,” he wrote another son-in-law (who happened to be the Mexican consul in California), “American democracy is the best democracy in the world.” When one of his sons spoke of pursuing old grievances, Vallejo answered, “No, let it go. What good to keep open an old sore? Let the wound heal.”
C
ONSIDERING THE FATE
of Vallejo, Brannan, Sutter, and Frémont, one might easily conclude that, whatever its actual chemical properties, the gold of California was corrosive of personal happiness, and that its coefficient of friction was such that it invariably slipped through the hands of those who acquired it.
Certainly there is something to this observation. Many of those, like Vallejo and Sutter, whose wealth and stature derived from the old regime, did indeed see their positions dissolve as a result of the changes the Gold Rush set in motion. And as for Brannan and Frémont, the proverbial warning about easy come, easy go, doubtless applied.
Yet there were others who managed to hold on to their fortunes, and
indeed multiply them. George Hearst was the best example in this regard, with one mining success leading to another and another. But even in Hearst’s case, the good example didn’t extend to the second generation. William Randolph Hearst proved to be the only child of George and Phoebe, from whom he inherited far more money than was good for him. Like Josiah Royce, Will Hearst found his way to Harvard—as a student who was expelled for a practical joke that involved sending chamber pots to professors. He took up journalism back in San Francisco, importing from New York the obsession with sex scandals, messy murders, and other manifestations of human frailty that gave the yellow press of the 1890s its peculiar hue. He also nominated himself guardian of the people against the monied interests. The incongruity of the millionaire’s boy assaulting the citadel of privilege cocked more than a few eyebrows, but when Hearst led a campaign that prevented the Central Pacific from reneging on its debts to American taxpayers, he earned an appreciative, if still somewhat puzzled, following.
Hearst expanded his ambitions east by purchasing the
New York Morning Journal
. Matching Joseph Pulitzer’s
New York World
sensation for sensation, Hearst’s
Journal
helped provoke the Spanish-American War, and it provided a springboard for its owner’s entry into elective politics. He ran for Congress and was twice victorious; in 1904 he sought the Democratic nomination for president. Failing, he ran for governor of New York; when this bid likewise fell shy, he threw himself into the creation of a media empire that spanned the country. He also indulged himself in an openly adulterous and long-running romance, and in the construction of an egregious villa at San Simeon on the California coast, where he dreamed of what could have been had he possessed a little more of the genuine common touch.
T
HE SON OF LELAND
Stanford might have turned out not much different from William Randolph Hearst, had he lived. Like George and Phoebe Hearst, Leland and Jane Stanford had just one child, whom they spoiled no less than the Hearsts spoiled their Will. But Leland Jr. died in
his teens, compelling his parents to find something else to do with their money. By the bereaved father’s own testimony, he was visited by the ghost of his son, who told him he must devote his fortune to humanity. Reflecting that Leland Jr. would soon have gone off to college, Leland and Jane determined to build a college for other young people. A horse farm they owned at Palo Alto (not far from Lewis Manly’s ranch) seemed a suitable site, and within weeks they were interviewing the most distinguished educators in America. The Leland Stanford Junior University was chartered in 1885; construction commenced in 1887; the first students arrived in 1891.