Dreams of El Dorado

by H. W. Brands

  The legend accounted for the Cascades of the Columbia, which were nothing more than the remnants of the stone bridge. It explained the volcanic eruptions of the high peaks on either side of the river, which had occurred within the historical memory of the Columbia tribes. And it made plausible the almost feminine grace and symmetry of Mount St. Helens compared with the craggier visages of Hood and Adams.

  How the Indian legend would have dealt with the 1980 explosion of Mount St. Helen’s, which spoiled the symmetry and left a ruined stump, is anyone’s guess. By then the theories of the geologists had improved. In their new version, the crust of the earth is in constant motion, with large plates sliding across the surface of the globe. One plate holds most of North America, which moves steadily westward; as its leading edge slams into a plate beneath the Pacific Ocean, it is dragged downward. The downward bending of this front edge causes buckling in the plate behind; the buckling is what has raised the great mountain chains of the West: the Cascade-Sierra range and the Rockies. As the western edge of the continental plate descends into the abyss, it grows hotter and melts, and some of the molten rock finds its way to the surface in places weakened by the buckling. Thus the volcanoes of the Cascades. Where the molten rock, or magma, doesn’t quite reach the surface, it heats groundwater to produce hot springs and geysers, as in the Yellowstone basin, which is the remnant of a giant crater left by a huge explosion when the molten rock did reach the surface.

  The movement of the plates explains not simply the topography of the West but much about the region’s climate. The prevailing westerly winds, caused by the earth’s rotation, bring moisture from the Pacific, which falls on the western slope of the Cascades and Sierra Nevada, creating lush forests and valleys but leaving little for the eastern side. The rain shadow extends across the intermountain zone and is relieved only partially by the elevation of the Rockies, which cast their own rain shadow across the Great Plains.

  The movement of the plates has had still other effects less noticeable at the earth’s surface. The heat of the melting at the western edge of the continental plate distilled and separated various minerals found in the rock of the crust, in much the way the heat of a petroleum refinery distills and separates the constituents of crude oil. Transported under great pressure by superheated water, the minerals eventually precipitated out of solution when the water rose and cooled. The result was the gathering and deposit of certain minerals and metals in concentrations far higher than in the original rock. Gold, for example, is found in the crust of the earth at an average concentration of around five parts per billion; after the tectonic refining beneath the Sierra Nevada, it appears in veins of quartz at concentrations of one hundred million parts per billion.

  The greatest part of those veins, and hence of the gold, remained far beneath the surface of the earth. But here and there the veins reached daylight when the overlying rock eroded away. The erosion carried small particles of the quartz and the gold down the slopes of the Sierra, often lodging them in streambeds, where they waited for someone to find them.

  JAMES MARSHALL WAS NOT A GEOLOGIST, AT LEAST NOT before he reached California. Instead he was a sufferer of a malady that over the decades sent many to the West: unrequited love. Born in New Jersey, Marshall had sought his fortune in Missouri. He found not fortune but an enchanting young woman who, sadly for Marshall, didn’t reciprocate his affections. He also contracted malaria. A doctor advised him he would never shake the fevers and chills if he remained in Missouri; Oregon was the place he must go. The fair object of Marshall’s devotion seconded the opinion; she was in love with another man—a doctor, as it happened, quite possibly the same one who prescribed the Oregon cure.

  Marshall joined an emigrant train and in 1845 reached the Willamette Valley. But he didn’t stay for long. Still yearning for his lost love, unable to find solace and rest, he struck out for California. He ascended the Willamette River and crossed the Siskiyou Mountains—a rare western range that runs east to west rather than north to south—into the valley of the Sacramento River. He presented himself at a trading post operated by John Sutter, where the American River enters the Sacramento, and applied for work. Sutter asked what he could do. Marshall replied that he was handy in numerous ways. Sutter hired him.

  Sutter had come to California for the same reason that Moses and Stephen Austin went to Texas: to escape debt. Sutter’s home was Switzerland, and his Swiss creditors threatened him with prison for unpaid bills. Sutter fled to America, leaving behind a wife and children. He told them he would make his fortune, repay his debts and return. He never did return, or pay his debts. Instead he dropped out of sight, in the distant Mexican province of California. There he followed the Austin model, proposing to guard Mexico’s northern frontier of California in exchange for land. He called his spread New Helvetia, in honor of his homeland, and became its grandee. He thought expansively, and was glad to hire James Marshall, whose skills would help him construct the commercial and landed principality he envisioned. He tasked Marshall with building a sawmill to supply lumber for construction and for sale.

  But events elsewhere threw a crowbar into his plans. James Polk’s campaign for president had included the acquisition of Oregon as one plank; the annexation of Texas was another. The arithmetic of the Senate and of the antislavery movement still prevented a treaty of annexation, but Polk’s decisive victory prompted lame duck John Tyler, who lacked any other conspicuous accomplishment, to sponsor a joint resolution of annexation. This did the trick, as a joint resolution required simple majorities in the two houses of Congress rather than a two-thirds majority in the Senate. The lower, though broader, threshold proved achievable, and Texas entered the Union.

  Yet not without embittering Mexico, which still hadn’t acknowledged its loss of Texas. Beyond this, a dispute developed over the southern border of Texas. Texas, and now the United States, declared that border to be the Rio Grande. Mexico said it was the Rio Nueces, a hundred miles to the north.

  The border dispute might have been settled if James Polk, by this time president, had wanted a settlement. Mexico could see it wasn’t going to get Texas back. But Polk, the most aggressively expansionist of all American presidents, wanted not a settlement but California. When the Mexican government refused to entertain Polk’s offers for California, he decided to force the issue by war. He sent American troops under Zachary Taylor to the disputed strip for the purpose of provoking a Mexican attack. For weeks the troops marched and taunted the Mexicans, yet the Mexicans refused to be provoked. Polk exasperatedly prepared a war request anyway, charging Mexico with bad faith, loose morals and sundry other sins.

  But just before he was to deliver the request to Congress, he received word that the attack he had been praying for had happened. American blood had been shed on American soil, he told the lawmakers; they must declare war. Not all of them agreed, but a majority did, and the United States went to war against Mexico.

  One American column drove south from the Rio Grande. A second landed at Vera Cruz and marched toward Mexico City. In due course the Americans occupied the capital. Peace negotiations began, but proceeded slowly due to the extreme weakness of the Mexican bargaining position. No Mexican leader wanted to take responsibility for the amputation of half the country. Ultimately, though, reality had its way, and the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed. Mexico renounced all rights to Texas, California and everything between; in exchange, the United States agreed to pay $15 million to Mexico. The payment allowed Polk and subsequent administrations to portray the transfer of land as by purchase rather than conquest.

  The Mexican cession, augmented five years later by the Gadsden Purchase, which added a railroad-friendly strip of desert to the southern part of modern New Mexico and Arizona, completed the creation of the American West, as it was generally understood. Alaska would be purchased from Russia, but it was a world unto itself for many decades. Hawaii and other Pacific islands would hoist the Stars and Stripes far to the west of Cal
ifornia, but they were yet another separate world.

  The creation of the American West, as the American West, was arguably the greatest accomplishment in the history of the American federal government. The American East had been the handiwork of the original states, which antedated the Constitution and had claimed territory to the Mississippi. The West, by contrast, was called into American existence by the federal government. The overwhelming majority of land in the West was initially federal land; nearly all the Western states began life as parts of federal territories. In time many Westerners would become harsh critics of federal power—demonstrating the age-old habit of children being ungrateful to their parents.

  The completion of the American West didn’t exhaust the acquisitive spirit that had driven American expansion since the seventeenth century. But that spirit would assume new forms with the transformation of an agricultural economy into an industrial one. The need for new land would diminish. Anyway, as of the 1848 signing of the treaty with Mexico, the American West contained more than enough land for several generations of Americans. Almost half a century after the purchase of Louisiana, most of that territory remained unoccupied by any but the native peoples. The lands acquired from Mexico contained an even sparser population. Plains, mountains and deserts distanced California, the most attractive portion of the new region, from the settled portions of the United States. California might not come close to filling up before the beginning of the twentieth century.

  JAMES MARSHALL HAZARDED NO SUCH PROJECTIONS. HE DIDN’T even know, when he set out for his morning inspection on January 24, 1848, that California was about to become American. Nor, more significantly, did the negotiators of the war-ending treaty, two thousand miles away, have any idea that Marshall was about to make California immeasurably more valuable than it had been the day before.

  Marshall was supervising the digging of a millrace for Sutter’s sawmill, on the middle fork of the American River, forty miles above Sutter’s fort. During the workday the men would swing picks and shovels, moving rocks and sand; at night Marshall would open the headgate on the millrace and let running water amplify the men’s labors. The morning of January 24 dawned crisp and bright; as the sun flashed over the peaks of the Sierra Nevada, its rays glinted on the quartz in many of the rocks, especially where the water had flowed overnight. Marshall walked the race, calculating where he would set the men to work this morning. The sparkles from the quartz caught his eye, but having seen it before, he gave it no mind.

  But one glimmer seemed different, slightly duller and more yellow. Marshall bent down. “I picked up one or two pieces and examined them closely,” he recalled later. “And having some general knowledge of minerals, I could not call to mind more than two which in any way resembled this—sulphuret of iron, very bright and brittle; and gold, bright yet malleable.” He tested the malleability of one of the pieces by smashing it between two rocks. It didn’t break but bent and flattened.

  He showed the sample to one of the men, who asked what it was.

  “Gold,” replied Marshall.

  The man was skeptical. Marshall called over another workman, who had a hammer in his hand. He directed him to pound the sample against a rock with the hammer. The result of repeated blows was a thin sheet of yellow metal—strong evidence of gold.

  The camp cook was nearby, doing the laundry in a boiling cauldron of lye solution. The sample was dunked in the caustic bath. Instead of reacting, it came up clean, supporting the gold hypothesis.

  Marshall mounted a horse and rode to Sutter’s fort. In a hushed voice he told his boss what he had found. The two retreated to Sutter’s office and consulted his copy of the Encyclopedia Americana, which had a detailed article on gold and its properties. The article prescribed aqua fortis—nitric acid—as a testing agent. Of the metallic substances that might be mistaken for gold, only gold itself would survive exposure. The acid was applied, and nothing happened.

  Sutter’s Mill. Here James Marshall (in front) found the nugget that turned the world on its head.

  Sutter and Marshall repeated the famous test of Archimedes to determine the density of the sample. Employing a two-armed scale, they balanced the sample against three silver coins. Then they immersed the whole apparatus in water, and the sample sank relative to the coins, proving its greater density.

  They could draw but one conclusion. “I declared this to be gold,” Sutter remembered of that fateful day.

  YET IT WASN’T SUTTER’S DECLARATION THAT MADE THE DAY so fateful. Samuel Brannan was Sutter’s competitor as commercial kingpin of California’s Central Valley. Brannan was a son of Maine who had moved to Ohio and there encountered Mormonism, the heterodoxy that was struggling to become a religion. Something in the message of Joseph Smith touched Brannan’s soul. Or perhaps it was the hostility the Latter-day Saints confronted. Brannan was still new to the faith when Smith was killed by an anti-Mormon mob, and Brannan threw himself into the effort to find a safer home for the faith and its adherents. While the main body of Mormons prepared to leave American soil and trek overland to Mexican California, Brannan was charged with reaching the same destination by ship, around Cape Horn.

  Brannan got to California, but the main body of Mormons never did. Between the planning of the trek and its completion, the American war with Mexico began. California appeared certain to become American, and likely as hostile to Mormons as the states from which they were fleeing. Brigham Young, Joseph Smith’s successor, decided that Utah would be a better home than California. Utah would become American, too, but once Young saw the valley of the Great Salt Lake, in all its daunting desolation, he judged that not many would follow his people there.

  Brannan first guessed that the plans might be changing when his ship reached California after a voyage of nearly seven months. An American flag flew above what had been the Mexican customs house in the village of Yerba Buena on San Francisco Bay. “Damn that flag!” Brannan said. Yet he soon saw enough of California to conclude that, American or not, it might be a good place to settle. A message from Brigham Young explaining the decision to stop in Utah and summoning Brannan prompted a difficult journey across the Sierra Nevada and the desert beyond. Brannan spoke with Young and tried to convince him that California would be splendid for the Mormons. But Young had made up his mind.

  So, too, had Brannan. He returned to California and gradually cut ties with Young and the Mormons. He opened a general store beside Sutter’s fort in what would become Sacramento. He had been in business only weeks when James Marshall came down from the hills and told Sutter about the gold discovery.

  The news leaked, and at once Brannan had an insight that would shape the California economy for decades. While Sutter and Marshall calculated how to make money from gold mining, Brannan determined to make money from the gold miners. They would need picks and shovels, boots and trousers, flour and bacon. He would sell them what they needed. The business model of Sutter and Marshall prescribed keeping the existence of the gold secret, till they secured rights to as much of it as possible. The business model of Brannan dictated just the opposite: telling the whole world about the gold, so that miners would flock to the gold fields, stopping at his store on the way.

  Acting on his vision, Brannan acquired enough gold dust from Marshall’s workmen, now moonlighting as miners, to fill a jar. He traveled to Yerba Buena—which would become the city of San Francisco—and strutted about the village, holding up his jar of gold and shouting, “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!”

  The news electrified the small community. One who heard it felt himself being swept away. “A frenzy seized my soul; unbidden my legs performed some entirely new movements of polka steps—I took several. Houses were too small for me to stay in; I was soon in the street in search of necessary outfits. Piles of gold rose up before me at every step; castles of marble, dazzling the eye with their rich appliances; thousands of slaves bowing to my beck and call; myriads of fair virgins contending with each other for my love—were
among the fancies of my fevered imagination. The Rothschilds, Girards, and Astors appeared to me but poor people. In short, I had a very violent attack of the gold fever.”

  The fever depopulated Yerba Buena overnight. Nearly every able-bodied man headed for the hills. No one gave them permission to scour the streambeds and gravel bars for gold nuggets and gold dust, but neither did anyone stop them. Amid the frenzy arrived word that California was now American. The frenzy intensified, for while Mexican law on gold had tilted toward the government, American law favored the finder. The gold was there for the taking. Who got there first would get the most.

  27

  GOLD MOUNTAIN

  SO BEGAN THE CALIFORNIA GOLD RUSH. THE NEWS SPREAD out from San Francisco Bay on the ships that visited there—those ships, that is, whose captains managed to keep their crews from deserting and joining the rush to the American River. The news reached Oregon, where farmers dropped their plows and headed for the gold fields. The news got to Mexico, which had a long history of mining. A thousand Mexicans marched north. The fact that California was no longer Mexican seemed not to matter; the gold didn’t ask the nationality of those who took it. And neither, at this stage, did the other miners, who were too busy grabbing for themselves. The news arrived in Hawaii; soon ships of gold-seekers sailed the two thousand miles to San Francisco. The news hit Peru and Chile; ambitious young men pooled resources and bought passage north. The news crossed the Pacific to Australia, which had become Britain’s outdoor prison after Georgia bolted the empire with the other American colonies. Transported felons booked passage for California. The news landed in China. Hundreds, eventually thousands, of Chinese set sail for Gum Shan—“Gold Mountain”—the name they gave to California.