Gold! (11 page)

Grapes are raised here in an abundance of a flavor unequalled by those of any country in the face of the globe they are a favorite of diet with everybody, high and low. The soil is in most places fertile beyond description and what water we lack during the dry months is supposed by irrigation. The season for sowing wheat commences early in November and continues until early sprung.

When I have made my fortune, I will perhaps revisit you.

Unknown

6.

TRAVELING TO THE GOLD FIELDS

By the end of 1848, the discovery of gold had brought thousands to the gold fields. They camped up and down the American and Feather Rivers, in every hollow and valley, using the most primitive of equipment to try to extract gold from earth and water and dust. Most of those prospectors were Californios, Mormons, and other “miners,” such as the Jack Tars from Australia, who were ex-convicts. The started to arrive on ships in San Francisco Harbor, as did Chinese and Mexicans.

Back east, the stories of gold had been well publicized in all the major newspapers. The
New York Times
and the
New York Herald
carried accounts. But whether the public believed them is a different manner. It was just too good to be true. A man born into poverty could, just like that,
overnight strike it rich and enter the upper class by discovering gold in California?

It couldn't be. Yet … if the stories were true, the country was not physically ready for the population movement that would occur as people struck for the gold fields. There were few roads west of St. Louis, and none were safe from the perils of the western frontier. The eastern publishing industry saw that.

Book and pamphlet publishers were always on the lookout for something to make money. To date, they had survived, but the industry was not firmly established. Books had to be able to give the reader something they couldn't get anywhere else, such as in newspapers and pamphlets. And no story to date had been able to do that—until Marshall's discovery.

By the end of 1848, New York's publishers were vying to put out books and pamphlets on the California gold fields and their infinite possibilities. Pamphlets also were published that brought together letters of Thomas Larkin and John Frémont describing the California landscape and the gold fields.

Suddenly, California guidebooks began to appear in stores. Sometimes they came from firsthand reporting—the first consistent example of travel writing in U.S. history. They promoted travel to California and the state's beauty and possibilities.

In 1848, Henry Simpson published his best seller
The Emigrant's Guide to the Gold Mines
. On page 27 Simpson offers advice to emigrants on how to get to the California gold fields. There are five routes to choose from:

1. The Isthmus route, across the Isthmus of Panama from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

2. The Cape Horn route, around the tip of South America and up the Pacific Coast.

3. The Rocky Mountains route—that is, climbing the Rocky Mountains after crossing the Great Plains and eventually arriving in the gold fields of California.

4. The Nicaraguan route, around the Isthmus of Nicaragua and once again up the Pacific coast.

5. The Mazatlán route, which required crossing northern Mexico to the Mexican coast city and then taking a ship north, to San Francisco.

“Only two [are] feasible,” Simpson writes, “with any degree of comfort or economy and we may add safety.” Simpson preferred the southern routes. “The Chagres steamer leaves New York monthly as also the British West Indian Mail Steamers and they reach Chagres on the Atlantic side in two days, where they will get a steamer or sailing vessel for San Francisco. The distance by this conveyance from New York to San Francisco is about 17,000 miles and will occupy 150 days or five months. Passengers should provide themselves with the means to guard against contingencies as they may arise from the no arrival of the steamers at Panama.”

If you chose the Isthmus of Panama route and your steamer to California didn't show up on time, you'd better have enough cash to get by on until the steamer finally docked. The shipping schedules were erratic and not to be
relied on. Going the isthmus route was rough going from one side of the North American continent to the other. To go through the isthmus took ten days.

“Canoes are here employed and passengers carried thirty miles up, when they are transferred to the backs of mules, and in this way reach Panama in two days where they will take another steamer or sailing vessel for San Francisco.”

“The safest route,” Simpson asserts, “is doubtless via Cape Horn. 25 to 30 days to get there. The price of passage first class is $400.”

If the choice was the Rocky Mountains route, the prospector would find himself going “across the Rockies, and the Great Desert, a route which by no means we can recommend.” The jumping-off point for such a trek was Independence, Missouri, from which wagon trains bound west, usually on the Oregon Trail, were every day plowing a highway across the country. “[Across the Rockies] the distance is very great; there are deserts to be crossed, mountains to be scaled and hostile Indians to be encountered.”

The overland route was the most dangerous. Even armed settlers were at a disadvantage with firearms. Many contemporary revolvers were no more accurate than a thrown knife. They were accurate only at very close range, and even then, misfires occurred frequently. Rifles were good for firing over longer distances, but again, they were none too accurate.

Even as firearms advances came along, west of the Mississippi you couldn't count on buying anything new unless it had been imported. Everything had to be
carried with you during that long, lonely trek across the mountains.

The least known, the “Nicaraguan route, is one which offers to travellers … as many inducements as now known. This we allude to is the Isthmus of Nicaragua, about 150 miles from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The greatest advice we see in the Nicaragua route is the ease with which it may be traveled and the certainty of proceeding with comfort and safety. The terrain is passable in all seasons.”

There was also a little-known route, the Acapulco route, which involved going from Acapulco, “which the American Mails steamers sailed. The passage is $1225 and the distance about 2000 miles. The cost total is $280 and takes about 40 days.”

There was one event that year that threatened to eclipse the gold discovery: the presidential election of 1848.

That summer, as the campaign got into full swing, slavery came back into the news as a campaign issue. The Mexican-American War had obscured the country's split on the issue of slavery, which threatened the very ties of the Union. There was concern by antislavery opponents that California and the new Western territories might align themselves with the South; this possibility needed to be avoided at all costs.

Massachusetts senator Daniel Webster, the man Stephen Vincent Benét would later claim argued a case in hell as a defense lawyer in his novel “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” excoriated Polk for the useless, arid
land he had acquired for Yankee dollars in the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. The war itself had taken longer than Polk had anticipated, so long that he had lost the support of his party. The Democrats instead nominated Lewis Cass, who fashioned a self-serving slavery compromise platform.

Breakaway, rebellious Democrats supported former president Martin Van Buren under the Free Soil third-party banner. Once again, the Democrats had shot themselves in the foot, failing to unite early behind one candidate. The Whigs, who had been out of power for twenty years, saw their chance. They no longer had to beat an incumbent.

The Whigs nominated the one candidate guaranteed not to lose. In the tradition of Washington and Jackson, the Whigs put forth the most celebrated military leader of his time, none other than old Rough and Ready himself, Zachary Taylor. Taylor had gotten the nickname because he was a slob and always showed up looking half dressed, with crumbs all over himself. But he was a popular general and an honest man, if a trifle eccentric in his appearance.

By September, all evidence indicated that Taylor's popularity was so high he was going to be elected by a vast majority. Then, on September 15, the
New York Herald
carried this item:

INTERESTING FROM CALIFORNIA—We have received some late and interesting intelligence from California. It is to the 1st of July. Owing to the crowded state of our columns, we are obliged to omit our correspondence. It relates to the
important discovery of a very valuable gold mine. We have received a specimen of the gold.

Two days later, September 17, the
Herald
gave the larger part of an inside column to a dispatch from its California correspondent, who called himself “Paisano.” Dated July 1, in the dispatch Paisano told
Herald
publisher James Gordon Bennett, “[You] had better fill his paper with, at least, probable tales and stories and not such outrageous fictions as rivers, flowing with gold.”

Everyone in California had gone to the mines, Paisano reported. Many came home quickly with many hundreds of dollars in gold dust and nuggets in their pockets. Prices for mining equipment had soared. Spades and shovels were $10 apiece. Blacksmiths made $240 a week. Comparing California to El Dorado and the
Arabian Nights
, the
Herald
correspondent said that “the famous El Dorado was but a sand bank, the
Arabian Nights
were tales of simplicity.”

On September 18, the paper carried another dispatch from Paisano, on page 3, the prize inside page that the eye goes to immediately upon turning the first or headline page. That day, page 3 also contained stories on France's election and a cholera outbreak in London. Two days later, the paper reprinted an article from the
Washington Union
in which the gold discovery was confirmed by official letters, including one signed by American counsel Thomas Larkin.

The article went on to say that “the danger in California is from want of food for the residents, and still more for
the stream of immigrants. Would not some of our merchants find it a profitable speculation to send cargoes of biscuit, flour, &c., 'round to the Pacific Coast.”

It was a good point. If people were going to leave home and hearth for the gold fields, what other place other than Sutter's Fort existed then in the wilderness to supply their wants? The
Herald
made sure to mention that the U.S. steam packet
California
would sail from New York on October 2 for California laden with a rich cache of supplies to provide for the needs and wants of aspiring gold seekers.

For the rest of the month, the
New York Herald
had continuous coverage of the California gold fields through Paisano's dispatches. The presidential campaign and the troubles in Europe still dominated the front pages, but you could count on Paisano to be in the paper someplace toward the front. Not surprisingly, the coverage was helping to sell advertising.

Outfitters' advertisements were coming in. So were notices by groups preparing for the trip to El Dorado. No one was rushing yet, for it would still take an official edict to make the easterner finally believe en masse and act on that belief. The same thought was going through the head of the editor of the
Times of London
.

He had been scanning the overseas dispatches from the United States and come across a short story regarding gold discoveries in California. Not only did the
Times of London
editor chooses to bury it on page four, he also doubted its validity, concluding with this paragraph:

The placer sand is said to be so rich, that if exported to England or the United States, it would be very valuable. Consequent upon this excitement, the price of provisions has increased enormously. We need hardly observe that it is necessary to view these statements with great caution.

The British government knew that if the gold discovery proved to be real, Britain could benefit quickly. If the discovery were confirmed, California could act as a relief valve, siphoning off the overpopulation of Britain's cities. In November, the
Times
of London printed a notice that the gold fields had been denounced as a delusion. The accuser said he had prospected in California for years, to no avail.

By late in the month, Britain had momentarily lost interest in gold. A cholera epidemic had broken out throughout the British Isles. More than nineteen hundred were already dead, with many thousands more infected, and the disease showed no sign of letting up.

In the nineteenth century, cholera was a deadly disease. First given prominence by the medical community during an outbreak in India in 1817, ironically it was forward-thinking technology in the form of transportation improvements, especially the steam engine, that brought cholera to Britain's shores. It then spread from town to town by horse and cart. Cholera swept through London in 1832, causing the death of seven thousand people in a most horrible way.

Cholera causes extreme stomach upset, nausea, and
dizziness, which lead to violent vomiting and diarrhea. Stools turn into a gray liquid that includes fragments of intestinal membrane. Muscular cramps and an insatiable thirst follow. Then, finally, the pulse drops and the final lethargy begins. Dehydrated, near death, the victim's face shows the classic cholera look of puckered blue lips in a cadaverous face.

What no one knew, because epidemiology was in its infancy, was that cholera was caused by the bacterium
Vibrio cholerae
. The bacterium released deadly toxins into the intestine, increasing secretions of water and chloride ions (salts) into the body. That resulted in the diarrhea, severe dehydration, and death of the victim. Luckily, only 25 percent exposed to the bacterium develop the disease, which was why in the same household, one parent or child might be sick and the others not.

Most importantly, what was not known was that the filthy sanitary conditions that existed in England during the nineteenth century, and many parts of America as well, contributed to the growth of the cholera bacterium and therefore the disease. Bathing, defecating, urinating, and drinking from the same stream or water source without regard to health consequences was common nineteenth-century practice. Cholera spread rapidly, especially in smaller settlements, where dung, filth, and refuse quickly commingled on streets and in ditches.