Which Way to the Wild West?

by Steve Sheinkin

The Whitman Massacre

  The morning of November 29 was foggy and cold, Catherine Sager remembered. She was at home with the Whitmans, helping to care for sick children. There was a sudden burst of banging on the front door.

  Outside, pounding with his fists, was a Cayuse chief named Tiloukaikt, along with several other Cayuse men. Tiloukaikt had just seen three of his children die of measles. Now he was shouting for Dr. Whitman to let him in and give him medicine for other sick children.

  Marcus Whitman let the men into the kitchen. Catherine, who was in the living room with Narcissa Whitman, heard angry yelling. “Suddenly there was a sharp explosion,” she said, “a rifle shot in the kitchen, and we all jumped in fright.”

  Moments later a girl named Mary Ann stumbled into the room.

  “Did they kill the doctor?” Narcissa cried.

  Panting and pale with shock, Mary Ann managed to say “Yes.”

  “My husband is killed and I am left a widow!” wailed Narcissa.

  Through the living room window, Catherine could see Cayuse men attacking other settlers in nearby buildings. “Then a bullet came through the window, piercing Mrs. Whitman’s shoulder,” Catherine said. “Clasping her hands to the wound, she shrieked with pain, and then fell to the floor. I ran to her and tried to raise her up.”

  “Child, you cannot help me, save yourself,” Narcissa told Catherine.

  Catherine helped carry her younger sisters and two other girls up to the attic, where they hid until dark. Several of the girls were sick with measles, and they called out desperately for water. Catherine could not help them. Finally they passed out from exhaustion. The attic grew quiet.

  “I sat upon the side of the bed,” said Catherine, “watching hour after hour, while the horrors of the day passed and re-passed before my mind.” She heard the clock downstairs strike ten, then eleven, then midnight. She listened to the steady breathing of the sleeping children, and the sounds of cats’ paws on the floor downstairs.

  Catherine and her sisters survived that terrible night. But Tiloukaikt and his men had killed the Whitmans and eleven other settlers, including two of Catherine’s brothers. Calling for vengeance, white settlers formed armed groups and attacked Cayuse villages, killing many people who had nothing to do with the crime. Tiloukaikt finally turned himself in. He and four other Cayuse men were tried for murder, found guilty, and hanged.

  Between the measles epidemic and the attacks following the Whitman massacre, the Cayuse were nearly destroyed. Survivors went to live with other Native American groups.

  And Catherine Sager was an orphan again. She and her sisters split up, moving in with different families in the Oregon Territory.

  A Bloody Preview?

  Violent clashes like those between the Cayuse and white settlers in Oregon didn’t happen every day, of course. But the Whitman massacre is an important story because it shows how tense things could get when large numbers of settlers started moving onto Native American lands. And it shows just how quickly those tensions could explode into violence.

  Can you imagine what might happen if tens of thousands of settlers suddenly raced to the West? You’re about to find out.

  Gold … Maybe

  By the start of 1848, a Swiss immigrant named John Sutter had built himself a nice little empire in central California. He owned nearly 50,000 acres, including farms, orchards, stores, even his own fort—a walled complex of buildings called Sutter’s Fort (soon to become part of the new town of Sacramento).

  In January 1848 Sutter hired a carpenter to build a sawmill on some of his land along the American River. The carpenter, James Marshall, led a small group of workers to the spot where Sutter wanted his mill. The men unloaded their tools and started working.

  On the morning of January 24, Marshall was inspecting a freshly dug hole when he stopped suddenly. “My eye was caught with the glimpse of something shining in the bottom of the ditch,” he remembered. “I reached my hand down and picked it up. It made my heart thump.”

  Marshall held in his palm a little yellow lump, dented and creased, about half the size of a pea. He collected a few more of these lumps and showed them to William Scott, one of the workers.

  Marshall: I have found it!

  Scott: What is it?

  Marshall: Gold.

  Scott: Oh! No, that can’t be.

  Marshall: I know it to be nothing else.

  Marshall was sure he had struck gold! Well, he was pretty sure. Actually, he didn’t really know. “It did not seem to be of the right color,” he later admitted.

  James Marshall

  Only one person on Marshall’s crew knew anything about gold mining—her name was Jennie Wimmer. As a teenager Wimmer had dug for gold in the streams of Georgia. Now she was working as a cook for Marshall’s men. All along she had been saying that the American River looked like a promising place to search for gold. No one listened.

  Now Wimmer took one of Marshall’s nuggets and turned it over in her hands. It looked like yellow chewing gum, she thought, “just out of the mouth of a school girl.”

  She looked up and said, “This is gold.”

  To prove it, she dropped the nugget into a pot she was using to make lye (a chemical she needed to make soap). “I will throw it into my lye kettle …” she said, “and if it is gold, it will be gold when it comes out.”

  Wimmer knew that lye (a strong base) would quickly tarnish most metals, but would have no effect on gold. The next morning she pulled the nugget out of her kettle. “And there was the gold piece as bright as could be,” she said.

  The men were still not convinced.

  Can You Keep a Secret?

  Two days later, John Sutter was working in his office, listening to the rain pounding on his fort. He heard the door crash open and looked up. James Marshall was standing in the doorway.

  “He was soaked to the skin and dripping water,” Sutter recalled. “He told me he had something of the utmost importance to tell me, that he wanted to speak to me in private.”

  Even before that moment, Sutter had considered the excitable Marshall to be, as he put it, “like a crazy man.” Now Sutter must have been really worried. But he got up and shut the door.

  “Are you alone?” Marshall asked.

  “Yes,” said Sutter.

  “Did you lock the door?”

  “No, but I will if you wish it.”

  Marshall wished it.

  Then Marshall took a rag from his pocket and unwrapped it. Sutter stepped forward and saw a few little yellow blobs.

  “Well, it looks like gold,” Sutter said. “Let us test it.”

  He got down an encyclopedia, turned to the G section, and looked up gold. He performed the tests recommended in the book, including biting the metal—pure gold is so soft that you can bite down and leave a tooth mark in it.

  “I declared this to be gold of the finest quality,” Sutter said.

  He raced out to the American River and told his workers to keep the discovery secret. But as you’ve probably noticed, most people can’t keep secrets. The bigger the secret, the harder it is to keep. And this was a secret that was about to change the world.

  Even after swearing his workers to secrecy, Sutter himself bragged to a friend: “I have made a discovery of a gold mine, which, according to experiments we have made, is extraordinarily rich.”

  Then, over the first few months of 1848, Sutter’s workers started showing up in San Francisco with bags of gold they had found. One worker went into a store and dropped a bag of gold flakes on the counter, announcing to everyone: “That there is gold, and I know it, and know where it comes from, and there’s plenty in the same place, certain and sure!”

  Recognizing a good business opportunity when he saw one, a store owner named Sam Brannan paraded through San Francisco holding up samples of the gold found by Sutter’s workers and shouting, “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!”

  As Brannan had hoped, people raced to his store to buy overpriced mining su
pplies. Then they rushed off to look for gold. By June 1848 three-quarters of San Francisco’s population was gone. Businesses and newspapers shut down. The only school in town closed its doors (and the teacher took his students along with him to search for gold).

  The Gold Fever Dance

  “The whole population are going crazy,” one Californian said. “Old as well as young are daily falling victim to gold fever.”

  A man named James Carson never forgot the moment he caught the fever. News of gold discoveries started reaching his town of Monterey, California, in the spring of 1848. He was sure the stories were exaggerated. Until …

  “One day I saw a form, bent and filthy, approaching me,” Carson remembered. “He was an old acquaintance and had been one of the first to visit the mines.”

  This guy had once been neat and clean. Now his clothes were ripped and his wild hair and beard sprang out in all directions. Carson watched the man open a big bag filled with yellow chunks and flakes.

  “This is only what I picked out with a knife,” the man told Carson.

  As Carson gazed at the gold, he felt something strange happening inside him. “A frenzy seized my soul,” he said. Carson was catching a disease that was about to spread across the country, across the world.

  “My legs performed some entirely new movements of polka steps … piles of gold rose up before me at every step; castles of marble, dazzling the eye … in short, I had a very violent attack of the Gold Fever.”

  James Carson

  One hour after dancing down the streets of Monterey, Carson had his mule packed with supplies and was hurrying to the gold mines.

  Gold fever raced around the world, speeding through South America, Asia, Europe, even reaching the Australian island of Tasmania (eight thousand miles from California). A Tasmanian store owner started selling a new invention he called “gold grease.” The idea: you take off your clothes, smear your naked body with the stuff, roll down a hill—and the gold sticks to you.

  American newspapers, meanwhile, were making it sound easy to get rich in California, even without magic grease. Readers in Philadelphia opened their papers and read a letter from a California miner: “Your streams have minnows and ours are paved with gold.” People all over the country were hearing similarly exciting stories.

  “The gold excitement spread like wildfire, even out to our log cabin in the prairie,” remembered a Missouri settler named Luzena Stanley Wilson. “And as we had almost nothing to lose, and we might gain a fortune, we early caught the fever.”

  Like so many Americans, the Wilson family packed up what they could carry, left everything else behind, and set out for California.

  But How Do You Get There?

  There was no good way to get to California. There were three bad ways.

  First, you could cross the country by land, using oxen to drag your wagons along the trails to the western coast. This was bonebruising, slow, and dangerous—and getting more dangerous all the time. As the trails got busier, streams and wells along the way got more and more polluted with human waste. This led to the spread of cholera, an infection of the intestines that causes severe diarrhea and vomiting. Death was often miserable and quick, as a traveler named William Swain noted in his diary:

  May 18: One of our company, Mr. Ives, is sick with cholera.

  May 19: Mr. Ives is dead.

  If you had about six hundred dollars to spare (which most people didn’t) you could travel by sea all the way around the southern tip South America and then north to California. This was safer than the overland trails, though you had to deal with storms, seasickness, rotting food, and barrels of drinking water that got so smelly, passengers had to add molasses and vinegar before they could bear to swallow it. For many, though, the real problem with this route was that it was 15,000 miles and took six months or more—too long to wait when you’ve got gold fever.

  The quickest route (if everything went well) was to sail to Panama, cross the seventy-five-mile-wide strip of land by canoe and on foot, and then get in another ship bound for California. Shipping company advertisements made this sound like a pleasant little shortcut. The ads failed to mention that travelers would be tripping through tropical forests and dodging disease-carrying mosquitoes.

  Nor did the ads mention that when you finally stumbled into Panama City, there would probably be no ship there to pick you up. Jenny Megquier and her husband were among thousands of travelers who got stuck on Panama’s Pacific coast. Every time a boat sailed up, desperate crowds raced forward to try to get on. Megquier kept a positive attitude while waiting, though she did find some of the local bugs mildly annoying. “Another insect which is rather troublesome, gets into your feet and lays its eggs,” she wrote. The doctor and I have them in our toes—did not find it out until they had deposited their eggs in large quantities; the natives dug them out and put on the ashes of tobacco.”

  Jenny Megquier eventually made it to California alive. So did William Swain and about 10,000 other hopeful people in 1848.

  Now the Adventure Begins

  Getting there was just the start of the adventure. A young traveler named Leonard Kip realized this when his ship sailed into San Francisco’s harbor. Kip woke to the sounds of the ship’s captain barking curses. He found an officer and asked what was going on.

  Kip: What’s the matter?

  Officer: You will have to row yourselves ashore, as all the men have left.

  Kip: Indeed!

  Officer: Went off last night, on the sly, laughing at us on shore now—next week, in the mines.

  This was happening a lot. As soon as ships arrived in San Francisco, entire crews raced to shore and headed inland to join the gold rush. Kip looked around and saw the result: hundreds of ships gently rocking in the harbor. They were flying flags from all over the world. They were all empty.

  Kip got the feeling he was entering a very strange new world.

  Welcome to the Wild West

  One day in September 1848 an African American miner was walking along the San Francisco waterfront. He heard someone calling to him—it was a wealthy white traveler who wanted someone to carry his bags. This guy may have been used to bossing around slaves back east. But things were different out west. The black man pulled a bag from his pocket, showed off more than one hundred dollars in gold, and said: “Do you think I’ll lug trunks when I can get that much in one day?”

  “What a Puzzling Place!”

  “This is the best place for black folks on the globe,” one black miner wrote to his wife in Missouri. “All a man has to do is to work, and he will make money.” This was enough to draw African Americans to California from all over the United States. Some were escaping from slavery; some were free men hoping to find enough gold to buy the freedom of family members still enslaved in the South.

  “What a puzzling place it was!” Leonard Kip said soon after stepping ashore. “A continual stream of active population was winding among the casks and barrels, which blocked up the place where the sidewalks ought to have been.”

  Kip was amazed by the diversity of the crowds: white and black Americans, Chinese, Mexicans, Germans, Chileans, Irish, Native Americans, Hawaiians—all with different styles of hair and dress, speaking different languages, racing between stores, bars, music halls, and gambling houses. “The town seems running wild after amusement,” he said.

  And wild after money too. By the time travelers got to San Francisco they were so feverish to find gold that some started digging for it right in the streets of town. And they often found it! What they didn’t know was that the streets had been “salted,” or secretly sprinkled with gold dust. This was done by creative store owners who wanted to get people excited, then sell them mining gear at shockingly high prices.

  Another clever merchant heard complaints about the enormous rats that were eating (and pooping on) all the food in the city. He imported a ship full of cats from Mexico. They sold out quickly (at eight to twelve dollars each).

  Then th
ere was the guy who declared he was a doctor and started seeing patients. No one in town was aware that he had no medical training at all—until someone he knew from back east showed up and demanded: “What do you know about being a doctor?”

  “Well, not much,” the man admitted. In his own defense he added: “I kill just as few as any of them.”

  Luckily for this guy, people were too busy making money to worry about small details. One such detail: the city’s dirt streets got so muddy that crates, dogs, horses, and sometimes people, actually sank under the surface and rotted beneath the stinky brown ooze. (A sign on one street warned travelers that the way was not safe for man or beast: “This street is impassable, not even jackassable.”)

  People were too busy to worry that no one nearby was growing food, and that everything had to be shipped in from thousands of miles away. The result was incredibly high prices. “Money here goes like dirt; everything costs a dollar or dollars,” said an astonished twenty-one-year-old named Enos Christman. Back home he could have bought a big bag of potatoes for a few pennies. “Today I purchased a single potato for forty-five cents.”

  But what did any of this matter when there was gold to be found? Most people stayed in town only long enough to buy supplies. Then they headed east for what they called “the diggings”—the gold-rich streams flowing down from the Sierra Nevada.

  Off to the Diggings

  As soon as he arrived at the diggings, a hopeful miner from Britain named William Ryan ran into an old friend.